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a VOA Special English Technology Report.
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The World Health Organization has begun to use a new
vaccine against polio. Officials say it will become
a major tool in the campaign to end a disease that
mainly affects children under age five. The new
formulation is known as B.O.P.V., or bivalent oral
polio vaccine.
It was used for the first time in December in a
polio immunization campaign in Afghanistan.
Carol Pandak is with the PolioPlus program of the
service organization Rotary International. She
explains that health workers have been using what
are called trivalent vaccines in some places. These
are areas like Afghanistan where more than one kind
of polio virus exists. There are three types of
polio virus.
The trivalent vaccine is least effective against
type three, more effective against type one and
highly effective against type two. As a result, few
new cases of type two have been reported since
nineteen ninety-nine. This has led to greater use of
monovalent vaccines to protect against either type
one or type three polio.
But Carol Pandak says the monovalent vaccine is not
enough in areas with both kinds of polio.
Rod Curtis at the World Health Organization in
Geneva says the new bivalent vaccine solves this
problem. Carol Pandak says tests found the new
vaccine to be thirty percent more effective than the
trivalent vaccine.
More than thirty new cases of polio were reported in
Afghanistan last year. About half were type one and
the others type three.
Rod Curtis says that shows the importance of the new
vaccine targeting both viruses at once. Officials
say similar vaccination campaigns are planned this
year in India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
Intensive vaccination campaigns have reduced the
number of new polio cases reported worldwide to
fewer than two thousand a year.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative says the
number has fallen by ninety-nine percent since
nineteen eighty-eight.
Polio is highly infectious. The virus enters the
body through the mouth, usually in food or water. It
grows in the intestines and attacks the nervous
system.
One victim in two hundred suffers permanent
paralysis, usually in the legs. Five to ten percent
of those victims die when their breathing muscles
fail.
And that's the VOA Special English Development
Report. You can comment on our reports at our Web
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