ScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2006) — A 2004 outbreak of polio in China traced back to live attenuated oral polio vaccine (OPV), which is widely used in global eradication efforts, highlights the small but significant risk to eradication posed by the use of OPV at suboptimal rates of coverage. The study, reported in the Sept. 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, and now available online, describes the first outbreak of poliomyelitis in China in more than a decade and the first in that country caused by vaccine-derived virus.
This marks the fifth outbreak of vaccine-derived poliomyelitis reported in the world since 2000, the year in which China was certified free of wild-type poliovirus.
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