Oral polio vaccine (OPV) has been an effective strategy since it was initiated almost five decades ago. However, concern regarding its collateral effects has been increasing in recent years among the scientific and policymaker community, since it has proved to be of risk for immunocompetent and immunocompromised individuals by causing cases and even outbreaks of poliomyelitis disease in countri...

Inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) is efficacious against paralytic disease, but its effect on mucosal immunity is debated. We assessed the efficacy of IPV in boosting mucosal immunity. Participants received IPV, bivalent 1 and 3 oral poliovirus vaccine (bOPV), or no vaccine. A bOPV challenge was administered 4 weeks later, and excretion was assessed 3, 7, and 14 days later. Nine hundred and ...

Had these and other issues been clearly understood in 1988 when the World Health Assembly passed the resolution that committed all countries to polio eradication by the year 2000, the decision to eradicate would have been more difficult. But fortunately, buoyed by the then recent success in the eradication of smallpox, active debate on whether to use inactivated or live polio vaccines, awarenes...

UNLABELLED To assess the dynamics of genetic reversion of live poliovirus vaccine in humans, we studied molecular evolution in Sabin-like poliovirus isolates from Nigerian acute flaccid paralysis cases obtained from routine surveillance. We employed a novel modeling approach to infer substitution and recombination rates from whole-genome sequences and information about poliovirus infection dyna...

BACKGROUND Dutch people born between 1925 and 1945 were ineligible for vaccination with the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) introduced in 1957 and may have escaped natural infection because of reduced poliovirus circulation. We examined whether people with low or undetectable antibody levels are susceptible to infection and whether memory immunity provides protection against virus excretio...

823 Experts have said that the failure by the four remaining countries where polio is endemic to wipe out the disease could cause a resurgence of more than 250 000 cases a year. Polio remains endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. “It would be a humanitarian catastrophe not to complete polio eradication now that we are so close ... to the finish line,” said Robert Scott, chairman...