By IANS
New Delhi : A two-year-old boy in the national capital is the latest victim of polio, making him the 500th case in the country this year, but health officials claim India seems to be winning the battle against the fast-moving, virulent type 1 strain of the disease.
A total of 500 polio cases have been reported so far in 2007 as compared to 676 last year, forcing the Indian government to declare a polio “outbreak” in the country after it faced intense international glare for not being able to eradicate the paralytic disease from the country.
“One more polio case was reported in Delhi last week, making it the 500th case in the country. In October, the first polio case was reported in Delhi,” said an official of the National Polio Surveillance Project.
But he added that their sustained war against polio has borne some fruits.
“This year our total budget for the campaign was Rs.13 billion. During pulse polio campaigns in the country about 90 percent of the children have been vaccinated in the areas that are vulnerable to polio,” he said.
The official added that their intense focus has resulted in bringing down the number of virulent type 1 virus in the country.
“Type 1 virus is the more dangerous strain as it spreads fast in the area. We were able to slow down this dangerous strain,” he told IANS.
While type 1 paralyses around one out of every 200 infected children and travels over wide areas, type 3 paralyses one in around 1,000 infected children and does not travel so far.
Uttar Pradesh, which was the global polio hotspot in 2006, has shown remarkable progress on the polio eradication front, said the official.
While India’s most populous state reported a total of 310 polio cases this year, only 21 were of the type 1 strain. In Bihar, where a total of 161 cases were registered, 34 cases were found to be of the virulent type.
A total of 67 type 1 cases have been reported so far, while the rest are of the less dangerous and slow moving strain – type 3.
Apart from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and New Delhi, the states that have reported polio cases are Haryana (six), Uttarakhand (six), Andhra Pradesh (five), Rajasthan (three) and Maharashtra (two).
Punjab, Gujarat, West Bengal and Karnataka have reported one case each.
The last time polio came to haunt India was in 2000 when 1,600 children where affected.
The official said India would continue to focus on targeting the dangerous strain as recommended by experts at the recently concluded India Expert Advisory Group for Polio that met on Dec 19 and 20.
International experts at the meeting opined that there was no need for India to change its strategy and they should first focus on eradicating the type 1 strain from the most vulnerable areas of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
“There would be an increase in the frequency of immunisation for both the strains. The target would be to cover as many children as possible,” the official said.
A World Health Organisation (WHO) expert said: “If India continues its fight against this crippling childhood disease, they will be able to eradicate it within the next two years.”
The official said the international experts’ committee favoured the idea of first targeting the type 1 virus as they considered the fact that in the last 11 months not a single case of the strain was reported from western Uttar Pradesh.
The experts also said that it would be not correct to tackle both the strains together.
Polio, which is incurable, leads to irreversible paralysis. Death occurs in about five to 10 percent of paralysed patients when the muscles of their respiratory system are immobilised.
The virus is transmitted through the faecal-oral route in unhygienic conditions. It enters the intestine and multiplies there.