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India’s massive polio vaccination
India plans to embark upon the
largest-scale polio vaccination ever, targeting every resident of the nation
younger than 5, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced recently.
Eighty-five percent of all new cases of polio confirmed last year occurred in
India. The newest vaccination campaign is one of several recent efforts to rid
the planet of the disease, a viral infection that can cause paralysis when it
attacks nerve cells.
The vaccination campaign, set to launch today, will employ more than 1.3 million
vaccination teams and will target 165 million children, according to the WHO. In
order to vaccinate every young child in India within six days, health workers
and volunteers plan to go door-to-door and staff vaccination booths across the
country.
The current campaign is a response to a polio epidemic in India’s northern
region that caused the country to be one of only two nations worldwide — along
with Nigeria — to report a significant increase in new polio cases in 2002. The
virus that causes polio remains a risk to citizens in five other countries
besides India and Nigeria: Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia.
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