New Vaccine Joins Campaign to End Polio
New formulation, first used in Afghanistan in December, targets two types of virus in one dose. Transcript of radio broadcast:
17 January 2010
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
An Afghan girl receives a dose of polio vaccineThe World Health Organization has begun to use a new vaccine against polio. Officials say it will become a major tool in the campaign to end a disease that mainly affects children under age five.
The new formulation is known as B.O.P.V. , or bivalent oral polio vaccine. It was used for the first time in December in a polio immunization campaign in Afghanistan.
Carol Pandak is with the PolioPlus program of the service organization Rotary International. She explains that health workers have been using what are called trivalent vaccines in some places. These are areas like Afghanistan where more than one kind of polio virus exists.
There are three types of polio virus. The trivalent vaccine is least effective against type three, more effective against type one and highly effective against type two. As a result, few new cases of type two have been reported since nineteen ninety-nine.
This has led to greater use of monovalent vaccines to protect against either type one or type three polio. But Carol Pandak says the monovalent vaccine is not enough in areas with both.
CAROL PANDAK: "You address the type one, and the type three cases go up. You address the type three, and the type one cases go up."
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