COPEN­HAGEN, Den­mark—As win­ter ap­proach­es, the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion yes­ter­day stressed the im­por­tance of stay­ing vig­i­lant as cas­es of COVID and in­fluen­za rise in Eu­rope, en­cour­ag­ing more peo­ple to get vac­ci­nat­ed.

“This is not a time to re­lax,” WHO Eu­rope di­rec­tor Hans Kluge told a press con­fer­ence.

The 53 coun­tries that make up the WHO Eu­rope re­gion, which in­cludes Rus­sia and coun­tries in Cen­tral Asia, were once again at the epi­cen­tre of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, ac­count­ing for near­ly 60 per cent of new Covid cas­es world­wide, Kluge said.

At the same time, cas­es of the sea­son­al in­fluen­za are peak­ing.

With this new wave of COVID, deaths and ad­mis­sions to in­ten­sive care are not in­creas­ing to the same de­gree as ear­li­er waves, and the WHO stressed the link to vac­ci­na­tion cam­paigns.

“Vac­ci­na­tion re­mains one of our most ef­fec­tive tools against both flu and Covid-19,” Kluge said, urg­ing those el­i­gi­ble to get jabs for both the in­fluen­za and boost­er shot for COVID-19 as soon as pos­si­ble.

Yes­ter­day, the WHO al­so marked World Po­lio day, a dis­ease which af­fects most­ly the very young and caus­es paral­y­sis, and has been vir­tu­al­ly wiped out in the west­ern world.

A mu­tat­ed vari­ant of the po­lio virus de­rived from oral po­lio vac­cines has how­ev­er re­cent­ly been de­tect­ed in the UK, Ukraine, Is­rael and the US.

Less vir­u­lent than the nat­ur­al virus, this vari­ant can nev­er­the­less cause se­vere symp­toms, such as limb paral­y­sis in un­vac­ci­nat­ed pa­tients.

While rare, the vari­ant has be­come more com­mon in re­cent years due to low vac­ci­na­tion rates in some com­mu­ni­ties.

“I think it’s im­por­tant that we un­der­stand that any­where in the globe if we left peo­ple be­hind, the po­lio virus is a very good barom­e­ter to tell us who are they,” WHO Eu­rope ex­pert Sid­dhartha Dat­ta told re­porters.

Dat­ta ex­plained that re­gard­less of the re­gion, the pop­u­la­tions af­fect­ed were those “un­der­served,” mean­ing that they for dif­fer­ent rea­sons had not re­ceived enough vac­cines to reach the 95 per cent cov­er­age tar­get.

No cas­es of the nat­ur­al po­lio virus have been re­port­ed in Eu­rope for more than 20 years.

“This is not some­thing we can take for grant­ed,” Kluge said.

In the re­gion as a whole, cov­er­age with the third dose of the po­lio vac­cine fell by one per­cent be­tween 2019 and 2020.

By 2021, on­ly 25 of the 53 coun­tries had achieved 95 per cent po­lio vac­cine cov­er­age. (AFP)