New Delhi: The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended India to take extra precautions while using polio drops.
In a WHO quality assurance study done in late 2008, it found one batch of about one million doses of an oral polio vaccine that was to target the most potent form of the polio virus called Type-I, to be of 'boderline' potency. This is probably the first time such a thing has happened.
This 'borderline' batch was unfortunately used in a vaccination campaign in Agra district in July 2008, but what may be heartening is that Agra district has since then not reported even a single case of Polio from the type-I variant.
Annually India consumes about a billion doses of the oral polio vaccine.
Speaking to NDTV, Dr. Hamid Jafari, Project Manager, WHO's National Polio Surveillance Project, New Delhi said 'no safety issues' have been found but since this bulk imported vaccine that was bottled in India was found to be of poor quality, hence here onwards, as a matter of abundant caution, instead of just randomly testing merely 5 to 25 per cent of the batches for potency, all 100 per cent of the batches would be tested. "All future batches of the oral polio vaccine will be ensured to have the highest quality," says Jafari.
India spends close to Rs 1000 crores on an ongoing effort to eradicate polio. In 2007 India reported 874 cases of polio; of these 83 were of the Type-I variant. In 2008, 559 cases of polio were reported of which 75 were of the Type-I variant. In 2009, till date 17 polio cases have been reported of which 8 are of the Type-I variant.