Day: March 23, 2019

The World Health Organization says that on March 27, India’s 1.3 billion people and the entire WHO Southeast Asia region will celebrate five years of being polio-free.

Twelve years ago, the WHO said, India alone was responsible for almost 70 percent of all polio cases around the world. It called India’s success against polio one of the most significant achievements in public health.

WHO officials said India’s accomplishment proved the crippling disease could be eliminated in even the most challenging circumstances with a strong political commitment.

Worldwide, the number of cases due to wild poliovirus has decreased from an estimated 350,000 a year in 1988, when the WHO launched its global eradication campaign, to 33 in 2018. 

Trouble spots

WHO spokesman Christian Lindemeier told VOA that polio remained endemic in only three countries in two of the organization’s six regions: Nigeria in the African region and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the eastern Mediterranean region. 

“There has been no wild polio virus detected in Africa since 2016, and we are cautiously optimistic that AFRO, our African region, is on the path to certification as well,” Lindemeier said. “EMRO, our eastern Mediterranean region, has only those two countries, which have never stopped polio, unfortunately — Afghanistan, Pakistan.” 

Lindemeier said the countries are considered a joint reservoir of the virus. Therefore, he said, both are getting most of the focus and support from the WHO’s polio eradication program. He said tailored and innovative tactics were being put in place to deal with the challenges in each country. 

The strategies include identifying, tracking and vaccinating migrant and hard-to-reach populations. Lindemeier said community workers would be trained to go door to door to find children who haven’t been vaccinated and immunize them against polio.

The WHO said the polio virus does not respect borders. It said polio would not be eradicated until every last child was protected.
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A group of experts meeting for the first time to examine the pros and cons of human genome editing say it would be “irresponsible” to engage in this procedure at this time.  

Late last year, a Chinese scientist triggered an international storm when he announced he had created the first gene-edited babies.  He said he had edited the DNA of the twin girls to protect them from HIV.

Having met at World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva earlier this week, the 18-person panel warned the procedure is too risky and should not be attempted before a system of strong rules governing this technique are established.  Co-chair of the advisory committee, Margaret Hamburg, said the group has agreed on a set of core principles.

She said the panel recommends the WHO create a registry for human genome editing research.  Under this system, she said scientific work in these technologies would be registered in a transparent way.

“We think it is very important to establish this registry to get a better sense of the research that is going on around the world, greater transparency about it, and in fact greater accountability in terms of assuring that research meets standards in terms of science and ethics,” Hamburg said.

The experts agree this would preclude the kind of secrecy that surrounded the work of the Chinese scientist.  She said the panel would like this transparency to extend to the publication of manuscripts that emerge from important research.  Hamburg said publishers will be asked to ensure the research has been registered with the WHO before it is publicized.

Hamburg said developing the guidelines on human genome editing is a process that will take about 18 months to complete, noting that it is a difficult, but urgent task that must be carried out in a thoughtful, comprehensive manner.

 
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