The Lancet  
Feb 11, 2012  Volume 379  Number 9815  p493 – 588
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/issue/current

Correspondence
Vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis in Japan
Miwako Hosoda, Hajime Inoue, Yasuo Miyazawa, Eiji Kusumi, Kenji Shibuya

Preview
Despite WHO’s recommendation to switch the poliomyelitis vaccine from oral polio vaccine (OPV) to inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) in countries where polio elimination has been achieved, Japan has continued to use OPV. In Japan, OPV is given twice to children aged from 3 to 18 months.1 More than 10 years after the elimination of wild polio virus, tragic cases of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) continue to be reported every year—most recently in May, 2011. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare claims that IPV is still being developed by Japanese vaccine companies and that it will not be available until the end of 2012 at the earliest.