World Polio Day being marked

Today, the world commemorates World Polio Day with the theme, “One Day. One Focus: Ending Polio – delivering on our promise of a polio-free world!”.

The World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and ROTARY today reaffirmed their commitment to continue delivering on their promise of a polio-free world for current and future generations.

In 1988, the world committed to eradicate wild poliovirus, and today, five out of six WHO regions are certified free of wild poliovirus, with wild poliovirus reported only from two endemic countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two cases of wild poliovirus type 1 were reported globally as of mid-October 2021 compared with 125 for the same period in 2020.

On 25 August 2020, the independent Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) for Polio Eradication officially declared that the WHO African Region that constitutes 47 member states is free of wild poliovirus (WPV).

Though 99.9 percent of polio has been wiped out with the oral polio vaccine, in rare cases when not enough children are reached, other forms of the virus continue to circulate. To overcome this, today Ethiopia launches a nationwide polio vaccination campaign with the nOPV2 vaccine targeting over 17 million under-five children to help end the circulation of all forms of poliovirus.

The campaign will be conducted in all regions of the country on 22-25 October 2021. Vaccinators will move from house to house for this campaign, and will also use temporary fixed sites in camps for internally displaced people (IDP camps) and transit areas..

In the WHO European Region, World Polio Day will also be utilized to commend all governments and their dedicated health and social workers for their relentless efforts to leave no child behind in providing life-saving polio vaccines. The message is clear: as long as polio exists somewhere in the world, we all have to continue vaccinating everywhere.

To sustain polio-free status, it is vital to vaccinate all children according to WHO national routine immunization schedules and to quickly detect any importation or possible emergence of a vaccine-derived strain of the virus. If a case is detected, immediate action must be taken to prevent further transmission.

However, our fight is not over and challenges remain, including the most recent challenge of sustaining routine immunization as part of essential health services during the COVID-19 pandemic.