Health officials predicted that polio will be wiped out in the Western Hemisphere this year, 35 years after the famous Salk vaccine began a dramatic battle against the crippling childhood disease.
The incidence of the potentially deadly viral disease has steadily declined in South America and North America since the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, the federal Centers for Disease Control said Thursday.In 1990, only four new cases have been discovered in the hemisphere, said Dr. Ciro de Quadros, author of the CDC report and regional adviserto a Pan American Health Organization project launched in 1986 to wipe out the disease.
"We are cautiously optimistic, but all indications are that we are going to totally eradicate this virus in the next few months," Quadros said. "It will be a major success story like the eradication of smallpox, one of the only diseases so far that man has been able to eradicate."
Quadros said the four cases of polio reported this year were in northern Mexico, Ecuador and Peru.
No cases of the disease have been reported since the 1970s in the United States, where some 600,000 people suffered its paralyzing effects before the introduction of an injectable vaccine by Dr. Jonas Salk in 1955 and an oral vaccine by Dr. Albert Sabin several years later.
The CDC report said in the Western Hemisphere, which includes the South and North American continents and surrounding islands, 130 new cases were reported in 1989, an 86 percent decline from the 930 cases reported in 1986.
In 1988, 340 cases were reported in the hemisphere.
All of the cases since 1988 have been confined to 99 of the 14,372 counties of Latin America, where widespread use of the polio vaccine got off to a slower start than in the United States, Quadros said.
He attributed the dramatic drop in cases between 1989 and this year in the hemisphere to an "all-out war declared against the disease."