World polio day on 24 October saw great optimism that polio can be eraducated.  There are only two wild polio virus cases currently identified in the world.  One each in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 
 
A polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan has faced challenges in particular over the past two years — due to vaccine hesitancy and the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a five-month pause in polio immunization campaigns starting in March of 2020.
 
The Pakistani government reported earlier this month that its third vaccination campaign of the year in mid-September succeeded in the administering of polio drops to more than 40 million children across the country.
 
A house-to-house polio vaccination drive for all children under 5 in Afghanistan will restart on November 8 for the first time in more than three years, now that the conflict torn country’s new Taliban government has granted approval.
 
The fear is that with such a low case count complacency will arise. The low case numbers are partly due to restrictions on public movement to prevent COVID19 from spreading in Pakistan and as restrictions are wound back cases could rise.
 
Rotary’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative was founded in 1988. The program has since reduced infections by more than 99.9 percent worldwide and immunized nearly 3 billion children against polio, preventing more than 19.4 million cases of paralysis. But Rotary officials predict “hundreds of thousands of children could be paralyzed” if polio is not eradicated within 10 years.
 
It is not onlt the wild polio virus that must be considered. There are outbreaks of cVDPV type 2 (Vaccine induced polio), and to address them, a new polio vaccine that carries less risk of changing to a harmful form that could cause paralysis in low-immunity settings has been developed
 
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