NIGERIA ON THE VERGE OF POLIO ERADICATION

Polio eradication is a very sensitive exercise and has remained intractable yet achievable. A number of innovations, concerted efforts, strategies and modalities have been developed and implemented to expunge polio from the world, yet Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan have still not eradicated indigenous cases of polio. In this article, we give an exposition of Global Polio Eradication Initiatives with focus on how Nigeria is scaling up local innovations towards immunizing children is yielding positive results with drastic fall in the number of Wild Polio Virus (WPV) cases from 49 in 19 States of the federation in 2013 to 6 cases in 2 States in 2014 and the improvement in lot quality assurance survey (LQAS) from less than 80% to over 80% threshold for the same period. We highlighted a number of innovations that are gear toward the attainment of the GPEI goal and the need to adopt the Polio Emergency Operations Center (EOC) model of polio eradication to other vaccine preventable diseases (VPD) in the control and prevention of other epidemic.