The World Health Organization (WHO) stressed on Monday the need not to lower our guard when cases of Covid-19 and flu increase in Europe with the arrival of winter.
On World Polio Day, the WHO cited the example of polio to justify the usefulness of vaccination.
“This is not the time to relax,” WHO Director-General for Europe Hans Kluge said during an online news conference.
At the beginning of autumn, the European region, which groups 53 countries, including some from Central Asia, is once again the epicenter of the epidemic, concentrating 60% of the Covid-19 cases in the world.
At the same time, there was an increase in seasonal flu cases.
With this new wave of Covid-19, deaths and hospitalizations in intensive care are increasing only slightly, the same source said, underlining the relationship with vaccination.
“Vaccination remains one of the most effective mechanisms against influenza and Covid-19,” he added.
This disease, which mainly affects children and causes paralysis, has almost disappeared from the Western world, but a variant of the poliovirus derived from oral vaccines has recently been detected in the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Israel and New York.
More virulent than the natural virus, this variant can even cause severe symptoms such as limb paralysis in unvaccinated patients.
Rare, this variant has further developed in recent years due to low vaccination rates in some communities.
“All over the world, if we leave people behind, the polio virus is a very good barometer to tell us who they are,” said WHO Europe expert Siddhartha Datta. “These are disadvantaged groups of the population, who for some reason were not covered by the WHO recommendation for 95% (vaccination) coverage.”
No case of wild polio virus has been reported in Europe for more than 20 years.
“It’s not something we can take for granted,” Kluge defended.
Across the region, coverage of the third dose of polio vaccines decreased by 1% between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, only 25 of 53 countries had polio vaccination rates of around 95%.
Source: TSF
