New vaccine could eradicate polio in India: Study

WASHINGTON: Use of a different vaccine could eradicate polio in India, where the infectious disease has persisted despite massive immunization efforts, according to a study.

Poor sanitation and high population density in India's impoverished states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have obstructed efforts to eliminate the disease, the authors of the study wrote in the journal 'Science'.

These conditions enable polio to spread and undermine the efficacy of the standard vaccine in use, the researchers said.

Instead of the standard "trivalent" form of the vaccine, which has weakened versions of the three types of the polio virus, the researchers recommend using a strain-specific monovalent vaccine.

Our paper shows that we're still seeing polio in India because the conditions there prevent the standard trivalent vaccine from working optimally, but this new vaccine should be able to finish the job," said Nicholas Grassly of the Imperial College London, who led the research team.

Grassly said employing the monovalent vaccine could allow for the rapid eradication of polio in India, which introduced the vaccine in 2005.

Polio mainly affects children under three years of age and in a minority of cases paralysis can develop and the disease can be fatal.

Since the late 1950s, vaccination has wiped out polio in most of the world, but the disease has lingered in India as well as Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.