For three years and one month, no case of polio has been reported in the Western Hemisphere, and the Pan American Health Organization now says the region is free of the disease.
The next challenge, the group says, is to eradicate polio from the world by 2000."This is a very great day," said Dr. Carlyle Guerra de Macedo, PAHO director, in making the eradication announcement last Thursday at a meeting of hemisphere health ministers. PAHO is part of the World Health Organization.
The last polio victim was a Peruvian boy, now 4 years old, who suffered paralysis in his legs and was found to be carrying the poliomyelitis virus on Aug. 23, 1991, said Dr. Frederick Robbins, chairman of a commission that made the eradication declaration.
That case led to a massive immunization program in Peru, which officials say reached every child in the country under 5 years old.
Robbins' commission of 12 prominent international doctors and scientists had decided to wait three years after the last case before officially declaring the disease eradicated.
Immunization in the region now exceeds 80 percent, and officials said there is no trace of the virus in the wild from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile.
But the danger remains, he said.
"As long as the virus is present in other parts of the world . . . the possibility of reintroducing the virus is always there."
Polio, which has infected an estimated 10 million people worldwide since the first known epidemic in the 18th century, is an infectious disease that attacks the central nervous system and can lead to paralysis and death.
There is no known drug that cures the disease, but it can be prevented with a vaccine.