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World Polio Day – October 24
October 27 , 2019
1666 days
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- World Polio Day is celebrated on 24 October annually to raise awareness about the polio disease and efforts for eradication.
- The theme for World Polio Day 2019 is “Stories of Progress: Past and Present for World Polio Day”.
- Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in which polio is still prevalent.
- The last case of polio in India was in January 2011.
- The SEAR (South East Asia Region) countries were declared Polio-Free in 2014, three years after the last case of wild poliovirus infection, detected in the West Bengal of India.
- Nigeria was removed from the polio-endemic list in September 2015.
- The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is “a public-private partnership led by national governments with five partners – the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
- Polio is a highly infectious disease.
- It is a disease caused by the deadly ‘Poliovirus’ usually affecting children under 5 years of age.
- There are three strains of polio virus known as wild polio virus (WPV).
- The last case of wild poliovirus type 3 was seen in northern Nigeria in 2012.
- In 2015, type 2 wild poliovirus was declared as eliminated - this is the second wild poliovirus to be declared eliminated.
- With two of the three wild polioviruses eliminated, only type 1 wild poliovirus is still in circulation and is restricted to just two countries — Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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