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New Delhi: A poor immunisation drive and widespread filth in India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh have fuelled a polio outbreak, killing about two dozen children and affecting nearly 450 this year, the health minister said.
"The quality of immunisation rounds in districts of western Uttar Pradesh was not of the desired quality leading to many children being missed," Anbumani Ramadoss said in a statement to parliament yesterday.
The prevalence of non-polio entrovirus in the stomachs of children living in the state's crowded and unsanitary towns interfered with the efficacy of oral polio drops, leading to a spike in cases in 2006, he added.
More than 500 cases of polio were reported this year from across the country, 443 in Uttar Pradesh alone, he said.
The polio outbreak in Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 170 million people, has fuelled fears that it could undermine global efforts to eradicate the disease, which is incurable and leads to irreversible paralysis among children.
The World Health Organisation has said the Uttar Pradesh strain of the virus had spread to neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh besides faraway Angola and Namibia. All four nations had been polio free.
India has stepped up efforts to combat polio by roping in thousands of extra volunteers to administer polio drops, especially in Uttar Pradesh where thousands of children were missed in earlier immunisation rounds.
Besides poor hygiene, a campaign by some of the state's Muslims that polio drops were part of a western conspiracy to make their children sterile have undermined efforts to stamp out the disease, officials say.
But international experts say new vaccine strategies could wipe out hotspots in north India by the end of the decade.
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