The Australian National Poliovirus Reference Laboratory at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory is the World Health Organization designated laboratory for the isolation and testing of poliovirus from clinical specimens within Australia, the Pacifi c Island countries and Brunei Darussalam. Surveillance for acute fl accid paralysis (AFP) within Australia, the main clinical manif...

In 1988 the World Health Assembly set the goal of global poliomyelitis eradication by the year 2000. Substantial progress has been made, and 143 countries reported no poliomyelitis cases associated with the wild virus in 1993. This article reviews the immunological considerations relevant to interrupting the transmission of wild polioviruses with vaccines. Although serum immunity prevents polio...

In 1989, a localized outbreak of 10 cases of poliomyelitis occurred in Saudi Arabia. Wild poliovirus type 1 was isolated from 5 patients. To determine the patterns of poliovirus circulation, partial nucleotide sequences of the poliovirus isolates were compared. These isolates were remarkably diverse. Two isolates were closely related to each other and to viruses isolated during the 1988 epidemi...

With national and global health policymakers facing numerous complex decisions related to achieving and maintaining polio eradication, we expanded our previously developed dynamic poliovirus transmission model using information from an expert literature review process and including additional immunity states and the evolution of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). The model explicitly considers sero...

In 1986 tests on faeces collected from a 22 year old Australian born man who had symptoms consistent with poliomyelitis yielded poliovirus type 3. In a neutralisation test using a panel of monoclonal antibodies the isolate was identified as wild poliovirus type 3 at that time. After further classification using microneutralisation, nucleic acid probe hybridisation, immunoassay and sequencing ca...

From 1988 to 1993, 30 cases of poliomyelitis associated with poliovirus type 2 were found in seven governorates of Egypt. Because many of the cases were geographically and temporally clustered and because the case isolates differed antigenically from the vaccine strain, it was initially assumed that the cases signaled the continued circulation of wild type 2 poliovirus. However, comparison of s...

The reappearance of circulating wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV 1) in Tajikistan is the first outbreak from imported wild poliovirus since the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region was declared polio-free in 2002. The risk of poliomyelitis importation to the European Union and European Economic Area countries has probably not increased, but the current outbreak is a reminder that high vac...

Sua'mmary The current understanding of the function of CD4 + T helper (Th) cells in immunity to infectious diseases is that Thl cells, which secrete interleukin (IL)-2 and interferon-3,, induce cellular immune responses, whereas Th2 cells, which secrete IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, and IL-10, provide helper function for humoral immunity. We have used a panel of poliovirus-specific murine CD4 + T cell clon...

Hallum, J. V. (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa.), and J. S. Youngner. Urea and thermal mutants of poliovirus. J. Bacteriol. 91:2305-2308. 1966.-Thermally selected mutants of poliovirus which differed in sensitivity to heating at 50 C were inactivated with urea. With 3 m urea, urea resistance paralleled thermal resistance. In contrast, when urea-resistant mutants were selected from ther...