POLIO INFORMATION

What Are Infectious and Potentially Infectious Poliovirus Materials?

Infectious Materials Include:

• Clinical materials from confirmed wild poliovirus and vaccine derived poliovirus (VDPV)* infections
• Environmental sewage or water samples in which such viruses are present, and
• Products of such viruses, including
  • cell culture isolates
  • reference strains
  • infected animals or samples from such animals
  • laboratory recombinants and derivatives that have wild poliovirus capsid sequences

* Field isolates consistent with extensive excretion or transmission in the community, usually demonstrating 1-15% differences from parent Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) strains by full VP1 sequence homology. VDPVs are classified as wild for programmatic and containment purpose.

Potentially Infectious Materials Include:

• Feces, respiratory secretions, and environmental sewage and water samples collected for any purpose where wild polioviruses or VDPV were suspected to be present at that time.
• Poliovirus permissive cells and animals that have been inoculated with the above materials, for example:
  • Harvests untested for polioviruses and enteroviruses
  • Uncharacterized enterovirus-like cell culture isolates
  • Undifferentiated poliovirus isolates

Note: Considered as non-infectious are clinical and environmental materials stored without refrigeration for three months or more, heat inactivated, treated with antiviral disinfectants, or previously tested and found negative for the presence of enteroviruses.

To find out if your fecal/throat/water/sewage samples fall into the potentially infectious category, please see the this Appendix, which is a table listing the year of the last polio case in each country. For example, 1979 is the year of the last polio case in the United States. If you have a throat culture from someone in the United States taken in 1979, the culture would be considered potentially infectious. If the sample was taken in 1980, it is not considered to be a polio risk, and should not be listed on the inventory form.

Definitions of infectious and potentially infectious poliovirus material may be found in more details in Section 5 of the WHO Global Action Plan.

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