A GP guide to the challenges of polio eradication
For more than 20 years, there has been a massive international effort to eradicate the polio virus. So are we getting close to succeeding?
Professor Leo Visser, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and president of the International Society of Travel Medicine, provided an update of the current challenges being faced in achieving global eradication of polio at the Southern Cross Travel Medicine Conference held in Sydney late last year.1
The WHO has been working in collaboration with Rotary International, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and donor countries, including Australia, for more than two decades to try to eliminate a disease that in the past killed thousands of people every year and left many more with paralysis.2
The polio eradication strategy involves childhood vaccination, mass vaccination days to ensure high childhood coverage if there is a diagnosed case, surveillance and environmental sampling.
