National Immunization Day
- National Immunization Day, also commonly known as the Pulse Polio Immunization Program, has been started across the country with the National Polio Immunization Campaign Year 2021.
- Currently, only type-1 wild polio virus is in circulation, so polio drops are given to children in the age group of 0-5 years in these campaigns. It was started in the year 1995 in India. It is held twice in the initial months of each year.
Polio:
- It is also called polio or ‘poliomyelitis’. It is a highly viral infectious disease. It is usually spread from one person to another through infected feces or food.
- Initial Symptoms: In most of the cases the patient is unable to detect its symptoms. Its symptoms are as follows- flu-like symptoms, abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, sore throat, mild fever, and headache.
- Polio virus type-2 was eradicated in 1999 out of 3 strains of the dreaded polio virus (type-1, type-2 and type-3). No cases of polio virus type-3 have been found since the last case reported in Nigeria in November 2012.
- It occurs more in boys than girls, and it becomes dominant in spring and summer.
- Children who have to undergo Tonsillectomy in lesser age are more likely to get this disease.
There are two types of vaccination against polio virus:
Inactivated polio vaccine (IPV)
- IPV was developed in 1955 by Dr. Jonas Salk.
- IPV is given by injection. It uses an inactive (dead) form of the virus that does not have the ability to cause polio.
- IPV is mainly used in countries where the polio virus has already been eradicated.
- Since OPV is produced from living polio virus, polio drops became responsible for some cases of polio every year, despite greater immunity to polio from OPV.
- Inactivated polio vaccines (IPV) began to be used in the United States in 2000. India has also introduced injectable polio vaccine or inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) in its regular immunization program with oral polio vaccine or polio drop (OPV) since November 2015.
Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV)
- OPV (the oral vaccine) contains a living, emaciated (weakened) vaccine-virus. When a child is vaccinated, the weakened vaccine-virus induces a protective immune response.
- People who are given OPV, produces this virus until some time after vaccination.And can infect others, especially those who have not been vaccinated.
- Depending on the different combinations of poliovirus, there are three types of OPV – monovalent OPV, bivalent OPV and trivalent OPV.
- After the announcement of the abolition of WPV2 in 2015, bivalent OPV is being used in place of Trivalent OPV worldwide.
- In some cases, it is genetically altered during vaccine-virus replication. This is called the vaccine-derived polio virus. In extremely rare circumstances, OPVs can also cause vaccine-derived polio.
- In the year 2014, India was declared polio free after three years of nill polio cases. Other diseases that have been eradicated from India: Yaws, dracunculiasis, smallpox, maternal and newborn tetanus.
Source – PIB
