Vaccination is one of the most valuable and cost-effective strategies available to medicine in the battle to prevent and control infectious diseases. It is considered to be one of the ten greatest public health achievements of the 20th century (1). In the Americas, vaccination has brought about the eradication of smallpox in 1970 and of polio in 1991; the interruption of indigenous measles tran...

Aseptic meningitis refers to a clinical syndrome of meningeal inflammation in which bacteria cannot be identified in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). The viral etiology and the epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory characteristics of aseptic meningitis among children aged 2 months to 15 years in Shiraz, southern Iran were determined. From May 2007 to April 2008, 65 patients were admitted to t...

OBJECTIVE Virologic surveillance of poliomyelitis to monitor the transmission of wild polio virus in the community. STUDY AREA All major hospitals of Delhi and surrounding area. METHODS Stool samples were collected from 1221 cases of acute flaccid paralysis during 1992-1994 and were subjected to virus isolation on RD and HEp2 cell line. Viruses isolated were analyzed further by microneutral...

PURPOSE To date, polio has not been eradicated and there appears to be a resurgence of the disease. Hence, there is a need to revive decision-making skills to treat the effects of polio. METHODS Here, we outline the aspects of treatment of paralysis following polio based on the literature and personal experience of the authors. The surgical treatment of the lower and upper extremities and the...

Although the 99% decrease seen in global polio incidence between 1988 and 2000 represented remarkable progress towards polio eradication, tackling the last 1% of polio has proved tantalizingly difficult. Pockets of endemic transmission currently persist both on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and in northern Nigeria. These pockets have permitted the reinfection of countries that wer...

It was hoped that following polio eradication, immunisation could be stopped. However the synthesis of polio virus in 2002, made eradication impossible. It is argued that getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical. Furthermore, while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute fl...

This paper reviews the current literature examining the pervasive symptom of fatigue experienced in three of the most common degenerative neurological conditions: multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and post-polio syndrome (PPS). The existing literature can be considered under four headings definition and prevalence, type, cause, impact of fatigue. Fatigue is a common symptom in d...

UNLABELLED The main post-polio syndrome (PPS) symptoms are new weakness, new atrophy, fatigue, pain and sleep disturbances. Polysomnography is the gold standard for sleep analysis. OBJECTIVE To analyze sleep patterns in PPS patients. METHOD Sixty patients (mean age 46.8+/-11.3 years) at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP/EPM) complaining of sleep disturbances were evaluated by mea...

During the 2014-2015 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Guinea, 13 type 2 circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs) were isolated from 6 polio patients and 7 healthy contacts. To clarify the genetic properties of cVDPVs and their emergence, we combined epidemiologic and virologic data for polio cases in Guinea. Deviation of public health resources to the Ebola outbreak disrupted polio v...

The present study investigated whether intrinsic fatigability of the muscle fibers is reduced in patients with post-polio syndrome (PPS). This may contribute to the muscle fatigue complaints reported by patients with PPS. For this purpose, we assessed contractile properties and fatigue resistance of the knee extensor muscles using repeated isometric electrically evoked contractions in 38 patien...