BACKGROUND Cases of paralysis caused by poliovirus have decreased by >99% since the 1988 World Health Assembly's resolution to eradicate polio. The World Health Organization identified environmental surveillance (ES) of poliovirus in the poliomyelitis eradication strategic plan as an activity that can complement acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) surveillance. This article summarizes key public heal...

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...

Despite remarkable progression toward polio eradication worldwide, wild poliovirus (WPV) importation has been a great challenge for China, as it shares borders with countries where WPV is endemic. The objective of this study was to estimate poliovirus antibody seroprevalence among children <15 years of age in 3 border provinces (Yunnan Province, Tibet Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uygur Auton...

declared the second-ever public health emergency of international concern. Polio is the emergency – a disease again posing a public health risk to countries around the world and requiring a coordinated international response. 1 For some, this declaration seemed a paradox. Polio is nearly eradicated. The virus that once paralysed over 1000 children a day in more than 125 countries paralysed just...

Waning immunity could allow transmission of polioviruses without causing poliomyelitis by promoting silent circulation (SC). Undetected SC when oral polio vaccine (OPV) use is stopped could cause difficult to control epidemics. Little is known about waning. To develop theory about what generates SC, we modeled a range of waning patterns. We varied both OPV and wild polio virus (WPV) transmissib...

Much infectious intestinal disease (IID) arises in the home environment. If programmes to prevent infection are to be effective it is essential to both identify the particular practices that risk disease transmission, and to understand the reasons for these practices. An in-depth, multidisciplinary study of carer and child hygiene in the domestic environment in the Wirral, UK, employed structur...

I read with interest the recent publication(1) on this subject. Since Kalawati Saran Childrens Hospital is a sentinel centre for surveillance of Poliomyelitis, covering the states of Delhi, UP, MP and HP, the figures are reliable and informative. It is heartening to note that the occurrence of poliomyelitis in these states has reduced to 369 cases in 1996 from 1062 cases in 1994. Does this figu...

To achieve complete polio eradication, the live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) currently used must be phased out after the end of wild poliovirus transmission. However, poorly understood threats may arise when OPV use is stopped. To counter these threats, better models than those currently available are needed. Two articles recently published in BMC Medicine address these issues. Mercer et al. (...

As polio eradication inches closer, the absence of poliovirus circulation in most of the world and imperfect vaccination coverage are resulting in immunity gaps and polio outbreaks affecting adults. Furthermore, imperfect, waning intestinal immunity among older children and adults permits reinfection and poliovirus shedding, prompting calls to extend the age range of vaccination campaigns even ...

BACKGROUND Phylogeography improves our understanding of spatial epidemiology. However, application to practical problems requires choices among computational tools to balance statistical rigor, computational complexity, sensitivity to sampling strategy and interpretability. METHODS We introduce a fast, heuristic algorithm to reconstruct partially-observed transmission networks (POTN) that com...