Africa, outside of Nigeria, is back on track ... Nigeria remains the single greatest risk to eradication. |
Hong Kong, with its dense population and fluid border with China, had one of the hardest outbreaks to control. |
Polio is not only an issue in Indonesia ... but it's an international issue. |
Polio is not only an issue in Indonesia ... but it's an international issue. That virus, just as it came here from the African continent, could now go from here to a neighboring country and become implanted in that country if protection rates for polio were low. |
So that brings us to two countries that have interrupted transmission as the outbreak containment continues. |
The finish line is in sight. |
The governments (in Canada, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong) have reported cases, and we see in each of these areas, the case reports are decreasing and becoming more stable so we believe the epidemic may have peaked there. |
The new approach is a more rapid approach because polio is considered a public health emergency of international importance. In an interconnected world, these viruses travel easily and don't respect international borders. |
There are some feelings that possibly live game markets might have been associated with some of the earlier cases, but this is only hypothesis. |
Today, one of the most important means of spreading diseases around the globe is air travel. |
We are seeing that we are beginning to tighten in on the disease. ... Eventually, we hope that it can be contained throughout the world and not become an epidemic or an endemic disease. |
We believe the outbreak has come to a peak in these areas because of information that ministries of health have given us. |
We still maintain that travel is not to be interrupted in the world at this point of time. |
What's dangerous about this is we don't know its potential. For the present, everything hinges on what we find out in China, as far as our projections [are concerned]. |