Ministers of Health from around the world will convene next week at WHO’s Executive Board meeting, to set global public health policies. Among other topics, representatives are expected to review the current polio epidemiology and global preparedness plans for the phased removal of oral polio vaccines. A report has been prepared, to facilitate discussions, available here.
In Nigeria, the Expert Review Committee on Polio Eradication and Routine Immunization (ERC) is meeting this week to discuss aggressive strategies to urgently eradicated both wild- and vaccine-derived polioviruses in the country as rapidly as possible. See ‘Nigeria’ section for more.
The first wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) case of 2015 is reported this week, from Pakistan. The case had onset of paralysis on 3 January, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. See ‘Pakistan’ section for more.
Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this week published their annual letter, outlining how they believe the world will look like in 15 years. In the letter, they highlight the urgent need to eradicate polio. “Destroying a disease utterly is a very difficult thing to do – so difficult in fact, that it’s happened only once in history, when smallpox was eradicated in 1980. But if we keep working hard... we can get polio out of Africa this year and out of every country in the world in the next several years.”