“We have gone three full years without a single case of polio,” Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said in New Delhi on Monday. “And I’m sure there won’t be any new cases in the future either.” After three years without a new case of the disease, polio is officially considered defeated in a country.
On January 13, 2011, the latest illness from the dangerous polio pathogen was diagnosed in India in a little girl from a Calcutta slum. The fact that no new cases have arisen since then is a “monumental turning point”, said the representative of the children’s charity Unicef, Nicole Deutsch. India has shown the world that disease can be successfully fought despite high population density and sanitation problems. Only in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan is polio still considered an epidemic – although the number of cases in Afghanistan and Nigeria declined last year, as reported by the WHO . “If the trend continues, the disease could disappear in both countries in 2014,” said WHO expert Hamid Jafari. According to him, Syria and Somalia, countries in civil war, are worrying. New cases have appeared there.
