India launches emergency vaccine drive

Two years after it was declared polio free, India said yesterday it was launching an emergency vaccination drive after discovering a strain of the disease that is not covered by its existing inoculations.

Although no actual case of the disease has been detected, health officials said they would vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children living in Telengana where the variety of the virus was found in a sewer during routine checks.

The WHO declared India polio-free in 2014, three years after its last case of the disease, hailing the achievement as a "momentous victory".