Nepal Must Keep Watch to Stay Polio-Free, WHO Official Says

Nepal must keep its polio surveillance and immunisation work going at full strength if it wants to stay polio-free, a senior World Health Organization official said in Kathmandu on Saturday, which is World Polio Day.

Prof. Dr. Srijana Shrestha, chairperson of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Certification Commission for Polio Eradication, issued a video message on Saturday for the occasion. She said continuous efforts are necessary to maintain Nepal's polio-free status, and that sustained surveillance is vital to hold on to what the country has achieved, according to Ratopati and enewspolar, whose reports were carried by Hamro Patro. The Himalayan Times carried the same message in its World Polio Day coverage.

The risk she named

Shrestha pointed to one route of risk in particular: the virus entering the country through cross-border movement. Nepal's open movement with its neighbours means a case carried across a border is the kind of event surveillance exists to catch early, before it can spread.

That is why the message was about watching, not just vaccinating. Polio surveillance means health workers keep looking for the signs of the disease, report suspected cases fast, and test them, so that a single imported case is found while it is still a single case. Immunisation then has to stay high enough, in every district, that the virus finds no easy path from one child to the next.

What polio-free status takes to keep

A polio-free status is not a one-time award. Regional certification commissions, like the South-East Asia body Shrestha chairs, exist to check that countries keep meeting the standard after the disease is gone: surveillance sensitive enough to detect a case, laboratories able to confirm it, and immunisation coverage that does not slip in remote or hard-to-reach communities.

For families, the practical meaning of her message is simple. Routine immunisation visits still matter even though polio is not seen in daily life in Nepal. A disease that feels distant can return through travel and migration, and the protection is the habit of keeping every child's vaccinations complete and on time.

Shrestha said Nepal's achievements in polio eradication are remarkable, in the words of the enewspolar report. Her point on Saturday was that remarkable is not the same as finished. The work that ended polio in Nepal, she said, has to continue for the result to last.

World Polio Day is marked every year on October 24 to keep attention on the global effort to end the disease everywhere, and her message placed Nepal inside that effort: a country that has done the hard part once and now has to keep doing the steady part.