Seventh meeting of the Regional Subcommittee for Polio Eradication and Outbreaks28 February 2023 Acknowledging that our common goal is to attain ‘Health for All by All’, which is a call for solidarity and action among all stakeholders;  Noting the progress achieved globally in eradicating wild poliovirus transmission since 1988, with endemic wild...

16 January 2023 – In October 2022, the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Afghanistan and Pakistan met in Muscat, Oman, to conduct a thorough review of ongoing polio eradication efforts in the remaining polio endemic countries. During the 6-day meeting they also provided strategic technical guidance on steering efforts towards successful...

Dr Hamid Jafari, Director of Polio for the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region, reflects on his time eradicating polio in India and what lessons we can take from this to address the final challenges for achieving eradication in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  India’s journey from the world’s epicentre of a highly infectious viral disease to turning...

Like any other infectious or communicable diseases, polioviruses do not recognize international borders. They do, however, recognize and spread effortlessly among young children with low immunity. To prevent any spread of polioviruses in their region, from 21-22 December 2022, Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health hosted neighbouring Chad and South Sudan...

KHARTOUM, 28 December 2022 – Tomorrow the Federal Ministry of Health in Sudan, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) will launch a catch-up vaccination campaign to vaccinate children against polio and yellow fever from 29 December 2022 to 3 January 2023. This campaign will cover...

KHARTOUM, 22 December 2022 – On 16 December 2022, a case of a variant type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2) was confirmed in a young boy aged four years in West Darfur, Sudan. The virus detected is most closely related to a strain circulating in Borno, Nigeria, in 2021, and is unrelated to the poliovirus variant that affected Sudan in 2020 and which was...

Qatar, supported by WHO, ramps up surveillance for polio during the FIFA World Cup 2022 Around the time when the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup tournament was introduced, in 1930, children didn’t have access to polio vaccines. Additionally, systems to search for polio symptoms in children were most likely weak...

Polio Director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region calls for people at all levels to act to end polio   Credit: WHOAmman, 24 October 2022 –On World Polio Day, marked on 24 October across the world, countries around the world are stepping up efforts to end polio. This year’s theme for the day has been ‘Together We End Polio’ and emphasis has been...

Djibouti, 12 October 2022 – The national polio vaccination campaign, initiated by the Government of Djibouti and carried out by the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with WHO and UNICEF, started on Monday 10 October 2022. It will run for five days, until Friday 14 October 2022. More than 150 000 children under the age of 5 in Djibouti will...

25 September 2022 – It takes more than a town crier reading off a scroll to close a polio outbreak in any country. Rather, it takes multi-disciplinary teams of experts wading through country-level data from polio eradication programmes – often more than once. They scrutinize evidence, crunch numbers to analyse information, and interview health...