Just over five years ago, a global study had labelled India the world’s “lone polio exporter”, prompting the United Nations secretary-general to write a letter of concern to Manmohan Singh. Even three years ago, anti-polio workers in western Uttar Pradesh, then the disease’s epicentre in India, were often abused and driven away when they came to the villages for the vaccination programme. Such memories today flooded into the minds of doctors and...

-AFP Later this month, India will be removed from a dwindling list of countries where polio is considered endemic, a huge achievement made possible by people like Madara, a 76-year-old street hawker.  At a temporary immunisation camp in a slum in the northern district of Ghaziabad, 23 kilometres (14 miles) from New Delhi, he is busy at work shepherding boisterous children into queues.  All around, social workers break open tiny bottles containing a...

On a wall on Station Road, among posters of Khoonkar Darinde and The Dirty Picture, Amitabh Bachchan looks out of a row of yellow-and-red posters and says, “Do boond har baar.” Here in Moradabad, the town in western Uttar Pradesh that till recently exported, besides its intricate brassware, strains of the deadly Polio virus, the posters have been around for long. The writing on the wall was clear: this was...

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...

-The United Nations   With no registered polio cases over the past year, India is on course to becoming free of the disease, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) reported today. If all pending samples for the virus test negative, India – once regarded as the world’s epicentre for polio – will become free of the disease for the first time in its history, reducing the number of polio-endemic countries to three:...