NZ and neighbours granted all-clear on polio

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Laura Ladkin can never forget the hot, steamy day in Rotorua nearly 50 years ago when she was struck by polio.

Aged 18, she was on holiday with her parents, staying at a private hotel just outside the Government Gardens.

On January 12, 1951, they caught a bus to Auckland. Her day began with a headache and other flu-like symptoms. It ended with her being carried off the bus because she was becoming paralysed by polio, a highly infectious intestinal virus that terrified generations of New Zealanders.

Yesterday, the World Health Organisation declared the Western Pacific, which includes New Zealand and more than a third of the world's population, polio-free. The certification has been hailed as a major step towards the target of global eradication of the disease by 2005.

The Americas were certified in 1994, polio is gone from the European region and is now concentrated only in parts of Africa and the Indian sub-continent.

Polio kept Mrs Ladkin, now aged 68 and living in Hamilton, in hospital for 18 months, nine of them on her back. Initially she was almost completely paralysed but she gradually regained mobility.

For much of her life her only disability has been a limp but she now relies on a wheelchair or arm-sticks to cope with the weakness of post-polio syndrome.

A member of the Post Polio Support Society, Mrs Ladkin said: "We've been very strong about having young children vaccinated against the disease. It would be dreadful if [the epidemics] happened again."

Before the start of polio vaccination in 1961, New Zealand was swept by epidemics every few years. The worst recorded was in 1956 when 1400 cases were reported.

One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. Up to 10 per cent of people infected die when their breathing muscles are paralysed. The disease mainly affects children under three.

One of the main requirements for "polio-free" certification is that there have been no locally acquired cases of "wild" polio for at least three years. That is distinct from cases that have been imported or which are linked to vaccination (an extremely rare complication).

New Zealand's last imported case of wild polio was in 1976, although occasional cases of vaccine-associated polio continue to be reported - there have been six since 1961.

A Ministry of Health public health specialist, Dr Doug Lush, said polio vaccination would continue until several years after global eradication. This was necessary to prevent any imported cases causing epidemics of the highly infectious disease.

An estimated 80 per cent of our population have been vaccinated, he said.

Medical Association chairwoman Dr Pippa MacKay said the WHO certification was a "victory for immunisation."