GPEI sending teams
The GPEI is sending a team to Malawi to support emergency operations, communications, and surveillance. Partner organizations will also send teams to support operations and innovative vaccination campaign solutions.
GPEI was launched in 1988 with the combined efforts of national governments, WHO, Rotary International, the CDC, and UNICEF. The GPEI partnership has included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and, in recent years, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
The CDC states, “[G]lobal incidence of polio has decreased by 99.9% since GPEI’s foundation. An estimated 16 million people today are walking who would otherwise have been paralyzed by the disease, and more than 1.5 million people are alive, whose lives would otherwise have been lost. Now the task remains to tackle polio in its last few strongholds and get rid of the final 0.1% of polio cases.”
Three wild poliovirus strains
There are three wild poliovirus strains: type 1 (WPV1), type 2 (WPV2), and type 3 (WPV3).
“Symptomatically, all three strains are identical, in that they cause irreversible paralysis or even death. But there are genetic and virologic differences which make these three strains three separate viruses that must each be eradicated individually,” according to WHO.
WPV3 is the second strain to be wiped out, following the certification of the eradication of WPV2 in 2015.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.