Today is the World Polio Day. Arsen Torosyan, a deputy of the “Civil Contract” Party of the RA National Assembly, wrote about this on his Facebook page.
“Polio is a highly contagious viral disease. It affects the nervous system, causing permanent disability, sometimes death. Children from 2 to 5 years old mainly get sick.
The disease has almost disappeared from the world thanks to decades of polio vaccinations. Only in Afghanistan է Pakistan և Wild poliovirus is still circulating. Wild poliovirus is still circulating only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The number of wild poliovirus cases has dropped by 99% since 1988, from 350,000 to 175 cases in 2019.
No polio has been registered in the Republic of Armenia since 1995, which used to cause permanent disability of at least 2-3 children a year. In 2002, Armenia was declared a “polio-free” country among the countries of the European region, and to this day, due to the high rate of vaccinations, it successfully maintains that status.
In the fight against polio, it is very important to replace the live attenuated polio vaccine (pictured below) with an inactivated virus vaccine, and for this purpose, in February 2019, our country replaced the live oral polio vaccine with a six-dose inactivated vaccine, which at the same time protects against the following diseases: diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough, hemophilia B, hepatitis B and polio.
