22 Aug 2024 • A two-and-a-half-year-old toddler from West Garo district in Meghalaya has been diagnosed with poliomyelitis or polio. The Union government says it’s a case of vaccine-derived polio in an immuno-deficient child (iVDPV), reigniting demands for India to switch to the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) rather than the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

Before the suspected Meghalaya case, India had not detected any VDPV case since 2014 although evidence of its presence had emerged in 2022 when a VDPV strain was detected in environmental sewage samples in Calcutta during surveillance for polioviruses.

Health Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh on Wednesday said the World Health Organization (WHO) is investigating to confirm if the new strain of polio identified in the state is ‘wild polio’.

Source: The Print | Read full story