Polio is on the road to eradication, no longer the prevalent crippling disease it was. This eradication is the result of persistent vaccine coverage over the past half century and will require more than surveillance. As global eradication approaches, Europe and much of the world will stop using oral vaccines. Although rare, vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis caused by highly mutated viruses is a worry.
Poliovirus is a nonenveloped positive-strand RNA virus of the family Picornaviridae. The coding region of the genome is translated as a single polyprotein and is then processed to generate the viral capsid and nonstructural proteins.