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India will introduce injectable polio vaccine in its universal immunisation programme from October. This is a part of the World health Organisation’s polio endgame strategy. With its last reported case of a wild polio infection dating back to January 2011, India last year completed the three-year mandatory period that a country needs to stay free of fresh infections to be counted among countries that have eradicated the virus.
“As part of the polio endgame strategy we will start administering injectable polio vaccine to children as part of the routine immunisation programme from October,” additional health secretary C K Mishra said. The vaccine also known as Inactivated Polio Virus (IPV) is administered as an intramuscular injection. It has been a long-standing demand of health experts that India should move to the injectable vaccine to minimise chances of vaccine-acquired polio infection.
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The National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation had recommended in May last year that IPV should be made a part of UIP, along with two other vaccines like rotavirus and measles-rubella. IPV is not recommended for routine use in polio-endemic countries or in developing countries at risk of poliovirus importations. In these countries, oral polio vaccines — either trivalent, bivalent or monovalent, depending on local epidemiology — are used. However as countries move on from being polio endemic to polio free, IPV is the vaccine of choice.
Though India will move to IPV in the routine immunisation, oral polio vaccine cannot be entirely done away with. The world over, even in countries that have eradicated polio, the oral vaccine is used to contain sudden outbreaks as had happened in Netherlands in 1992. This is because IPV cannot stop virus transmission.
“OPV is the vaccine of choice in case of an outbreak and even if we move to IPV we have to be prepared for all contingencies. That is why even if OPV use is discontinued in routine immunisation the vaccine may have to be brought back at short notice,” a senior health ministry official said.
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