India says will be polio-free in three years
Source: Reuters
By Kamil Zaheer NEW DELHI, Dec 19 (Reuters) - India will wipe out polio in the next three years, the country's health minister said on Tuesday, despite a surge in cases this year that has raised concern abroad. In one of the biggest outbreaks of the virus in recent years, India has reported 583 polio cases in 2006 -- 481 of them in the poor, populous state of Uttar Pradesh -- fuelling fears it could undermine global efforts to eradicate the disease. At least two dozen children died in the outbreak. The country reported just 66 cases last year. But Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told a news conference, he was confident the battle would be won with the help of a stepped up immunisation drive. "In three years, we will do away with polio," he said. "We are at the end of the problem and will hit the final nail in the coffin," Ramadoss said. The Uttar Pradesh polio strain has spread to neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh as well as faraway Angola and Nambia. All four were polio-free. Health authorities suspect the virus was carried by a traveller who had it in his intestines where it can linger for up to six weeks. International experts said India was in the final stages of eradicating polio after bringing numbers down from the thousands in the 1980s, but this could be the toughest part. "The last few cases are the most difficult to eliminate," Julie Louise Gerberding, head of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told the same news conference. The CDC is helping New Delhi fight polio and provided $13.5 million in funding this year. Gerberding complimented India's efforts in bringing down the number of annual cases sharply -- from thousands per year in the 1980s -- but said the 2006 outbreak should make officials sit up. "It is a warning that we can't be complacent," she said. Federal authorities said national immunisation efforts planned for January and February would target worst-hit regions, particularly parts of Uttar Pradesh, where poor sanitation and healthcare services in crowded towns fuelled the outbreak. Islamic clerics have offered to join vaccination teams in Muslim-dominated parts of the state where many parents are unwilling to let children be given the drugs due to rumours they were part of a Western conspiracy to make them sterile. Greater use would be made of a so-called monovalent vaccine that targets the dominant strain rather than those that works against three types of the virus. (Additional reporting by Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow)
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