The jab jigsaw
Has India been short-sighted in its approach towards stamping out polio? Is the World Health Organization (who) foisting a discriminatory polio eradication agenda on developing countries like India? Or is the pharmaceutical industry eyeing gains by pushing an alternative means to stave off the threat of the disease? Lingering doubts such as these arose afresh after a recent recommendation of the India Expert Advisory Group for Polio Eradication rekindled the debate regarding the kind of vaccine that should be used in the country. The group, which comes under the Union ministry of health and family welfare, suggested an increase in the number of immunisation rounds by administering oral polio vaccine (opv) in areas where the infection reappears. Significantly, a lack of consensus on the type of vaccine is said to be one of the reasons why India's polio programme has not been effective.
Apart from opv, which comprises a weakened strain of the wild virus, the other mode of immunisation is the inactivated polio vaccine (ipv) that consists of the killed wild virus. While opv controls the disease in two ways