India is polio free, an independent commission under the World Health Organisation (WHO) has certified, marking a health milestone for the country.
After three years of being polio free, India’s achievement translates into the South East Asian (SEA) region also becoming polio free. India is the largest country in this 11-country SEA region, and the most recent to clock three polio free years.
The certificate was given by a panel of 11 independent experts in the field of public health, clinical medicine and related fields, constituting the South-East Asia Regional Certification Commission for Polio Eradication.
The region is the fourth of six WHO regions to be certified as polio-free. With this, 80 per cent of the world population is now in polio-free countries, the UN health body said.
The other three polio-free regions are the Americas, the Western Pacific Region and the European Region.
Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad received the certificate from the WHO on behalf of India.
Azad, after the certification ceremony, said the country could not rest on its laurels and needed to continue the work to ensure India did not get re-infected.
According to the international guidelines, a country or region has to be polio-free at least for three years to be certified. India touched this milestone in January this year.
However, the country’s close proximity to polio-affected nations such as Pakistan and Afghanistan poses a threat. To prevent re-infection, the India Government had recently made it mandatory for travellers to and from seven countries – Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria and Pakistan – to take oral polio vaccine before entering or leaving Indian borders.
The threat of re-infection, in fact, is genuine and in 2013 alone, it is estimated that six countries, which had earlier achieved “polio-free” status had been re-infected.
Following the certification, all the 11 South East Asian countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste – will have to introduce one dose of inactivated polio vaccine by 2015-end into their routine immunisation programmes. This is a step towards the phased removal of the oral polio vaccine globally.