Say Yes, Autumn 2002: The Polio Endgame

The historic decision to certify WHO European Region polio-free was announced on the 21st of June 2002 at a meeting of the European Regional Commission for Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication (RCC) in Copenhagen. For some 870 million people living in the fifty-one member states of the region, this was the most important milestone in public health for the new millennium.

This is a tremendous achievement in the global effort to eradicate polio. To get where we are today required the full commitment and cooperation of each of our fifty-one Member States, the hard work of public health workers in the field and the firm support of international partners in coordination with WHO declared Dr Marc Danzon, WHO Regional Director for Europe.

The European Region has in fact been free of poliomyelitis for over three years. Europe’s last case of indigenous wild poliomyelitis occurred in eastern Turkey in 1998, when a two-year-old boy who had not been vaccinated was paralysed by the virus.

Eradication

The path to a polio-free Europe began in 1988, following the call of the World Health Assembly to eradicate polio. A partnership was set up by WHO, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and UNICEF to free the world of the disease.

Success in Europe was achieved through unprecedented coordinated national immunisation campaigns. Sixty million children under five years of age received two extra doses of polio vaccine every year between 1995 and 1998. Since 1997, there were special door-to-door mass vaccinations in the high-risk areas. Supplementary vaccination campaigns continued in high-risk countries through 2002.

The synchronisation of immunisation days between neighbouring countries has become a model for the eradication of polio globally.

Certification

An independent panel of experts who make up the RCC has been engaged in the formal certification process in Europe since 1996.

Before certification could be declared, the RCC had to scrutinise surveillance data and the evidence of national certification committees. In addition, the RCC received firm commitments from all ministries of health that immunisation and surveillance of the disease would continue.

Excellent surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis is an essential tool in regional certification and in the global initiative to eradicate polio. It provides the exact location and age of every child stricken with polio, guiding immediate immunisation responses, said Dr David Fleming, Acting Director of the CDC.

In Europe and elsewhere we have worked to reach children living in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable, including conflict-affected areas, said Philip O’Brien, UNICEF Regional Director for the CEE/CIS region. This unprecedented effort, which has been rewarded today with European certification, must be continued until we reach children everywhere with polio vaccine.

In Turkey, polio eradication activities have been ongoing since 1989. In 1995, in order to halt circulation of the virus, National Immunisation Days (NIDs) were initiated and 6.5 million children have been immunised each year since.

In addition, all cases of immediate paralysis in childhood have been closely monitored by the Ministry of Health (MOH) through clinical and laboratory tests in order to find out whether the polio virus was the cause.

No case of polio has been reported in Turkey since November 1998.

For more information about UNICEF Turkey’s activities regarding Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) and Immunisation, see the Programmes section. Read Early Childcare in the February 2002 issue of Say Yes. See the In This Issue section for more background on the development of Polio vaccines.

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