Polio breakthrough: India marks disease-free year
By Adam Plowright (AFP) – 12 hours ago

NEW DELHI — India marked a year since its last new case of polio Friday, a major milestone in a country once considered the epicentre of the disease and one that gives hope the scourge can be eradicated worldwide.

There were 150,000 cases of the highly contagious virus in India in 1985, but the country has now gone 12 months since discovering a new case -- in an 18-month-old girl in the eastern state of West Bengal.

India, which until recently accounted for half of all the polio cases in the world, is one of four countries -- with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria -- where the disease is still officially endemic.

But if all laboratory tests for the wild polio virus return negative in January, India will follow recent success stories Niger and Egypt and be removed from the endemic list by the World Health Organisation by mid-February.

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