Polio health emergency...the WHO Warns

Poliomyelitis has existed as long as human society, but became a major public health issue in late Victorian times with major epidemics in Europe and the United States. The disease, which causes spinal and respiratory paralysis, can kill and remains incurable but vaccines have assisted in its almost total eradication today

The history of poliomyelitis (polio) infections extends into prehistory. Although major polio epidemics were unknown before the 20th century,  the disease has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. Over millennia, polio survived quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1880s when major epidemics began to occur in Europe; soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the United States. By 1910, frequent epidemics became regular events throughout the developed world, primarily in cities during the summer months. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year.
The fear and the collective response to these epidemics would give rise to extraordinary public reaction and mobilization; spurring the development of new methods to prevent and treat the disease, and revolutionizing medical philanthropy. Although the development of two polio vaccines has all but eradicated poliomyelitis it has recently reappeared.

The WHO recorded 417 cases of polio worldwide for the whole of 2013. For 2014, it had already recorded 68 cases by April 30th - up from 24 in the same period last year. Polio mainly affects children under five years old. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water, and multiplies in the intestine. It can then invade the nervous system, causing paralysis in one in every 200 infections. It is capable of causing death within hours.
"The conditions for a public health emergency of international concern have been met," said Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director General. He was speaking after last week's emergency meeting in Geneva on the spread of polio which included representatives of the affected countries.
"The international spread of polio to date in 2014 constitutes an 'extraordinary event' and a public health risk to other states for which a co-ordinated international response is essential," the WHO's International Health Regulations Emergency Committee said in statement.

 

Polio infected countries

• Afghanistan
• Cameroon
• Equatorial Guinea
• Ethiopia
• Iraq
• Israel
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Somalia
• Syria
• Source: WHO

"If unchecked, this situation could result in failure to eradicate globally one of the world's most serious vaccine preventable diseases."

The WHO also lists Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Somalia and Nigeria as "posing an ongoing risk for new wild poliovirus exportations in 2014."
It is only the second time in the WHO's history it has made such a declaration, the first being during the swine flu pandemic of 2009 .

The polio virus is endemic in just three countries - Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. But attacks on vaccination campaigns in Pakistan in particular have allowed the virus to spread across borders. Syria, which was polio-free for 14 years, was re-infected with the virus from Pakistan. Refugees are still pouring out of Syria, to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and checking whether all of them have been vaccinated will be impossible, the WHO says.