India has recorded its first case of polio caused by a vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) this year in a five-month-old child in Murshidabad district of Bengal but the country remains free of the wild poliovirus. A polio surveillance laboratory in Calcutta has found that the child from Lalbag block in Murshidabad was infected by VDPV, which occurs when the weakened virus in the oral polio vaccine (OPV) mutates over time, and regains...

India has just been taken off the World Health Organisation (WHO) list of polio-endemic countries. And if the success of not having a single new case over the past year is sustained for another two years, India will finally emerge as a polio-free country. The nation's public health administrators and international agencies deserve praise for this achievement. This is also perhaps just the right moment to recall the hands-on leadership role...

India seems to have arrived at the threshold of polio eradication, but should it lower its guard? ON January 13, India achieved what had only two years ago seemed impossible in the immediate term. The country, which, given the epidemiological data in the new millennium, had come to be regarded by health experts around the world as one that would be the last to achieve freedom from polio (poliomyelitis), recorded no...

While one year has passed without polio caused by natural poliovirus, we can claim complete eradication only after we ensure the absence of wild and vaccine polioviruses in the population. Today, India passes one whole year without polio caused by natural (wild) poliovirus — a major milestone towards polio eradication. This spells relief from an agonising decade of wild polioviruses refusing to surrender. Many experts believed that India posed the greatest...

With only three more days of negotiations to go, UN chief Ban Ki-moon says agreement may be 'beyond our reach – for now' A global legally binding deal on climate change is likely to be off the table, at least "for now", the United Nations secretary-general has said in his most downbeat assessment of the talks. Assessing the nine days of negotiations at Durban so far, Ban Ki-moon told delegates: "It may...