Polio could be wiped out in Nigeria thanks to improved vaccine, says study

The new research comes just 4 months after the World Health Assembly expressed alarm over a dramatic increase in type 1 cases in Nigeria because of poor immunisation in the north of the country. The Government of Nigeria subsequently established a Presidential Task Force to identify barriers to immunisation and potential solutions.

A previous study, published in the Lancet in 2007, looked at how well polio vaccines were working in Northern India and revealed that there, although mOPV1 was three times more effective than the trivalent vaccine, environmental factors compromised the efficacy of both the trivalent and monovalent oral vaccines. The researchers behind today's study say that the mOPV1's effectiveness is not as badly compromised by environmental conditions in Nigeria. This means that the key to eliminating polio in Nigeria is reaching sufficient numbers of children with the vaccine, demonstrating the feasibility of elimination in Africa.

Helen Jenkins, the corresponding author of the study from the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London, said: "Nigeria and India are responsible for the vast majority of new global polio cases. In Nigeria, we now have an effective vaccine to use and we've seen the start of improvements in vaccine uptake. These last pockets of unvaccinated children now need to be reached to achieve elimination in Nigeria and this in turn will have a dramatic impact on the prospects of worldwide eradication."

The researchers reached their conclusions after analysing the vaccination histories of 21,815 children with acute flaccid paralysis, 14% of whom had polio, collected between January 2001 and December 2007.

This study was supported by the Medical Research Council and the Royal Society.