Polio priority countries and the 2018 Hajj: Leveraging an opportunity

During the past three decades, since the 1988 World Health Assembly resolution to eradicate polio, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) efforts have decreased global polio incidence by 99.9%. GPEI efforts have benefitted over 16 million people who would otherwise have been paralysed, and approximately 1.5 million people whose lives would otherwise have been lost [1]. Now the task remains to tackle poliovirus transmission in its last few strongholds through parallel pursuits of wild poliovirus (WPV) eradication and vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) transmission elimination [2,3].
Source: Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease - Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Source Type: research