Sanofi Pasteur to provide vaccine doses to help eradicate polio

Sanofi Pasteur has announced that it will be providing 1.7 billion doses of oral polio vaccine to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative between 2013 and 2017.

In addition, the company is to expand its injectable polio vaccine production capacity, with the ultimate aim of meeting the World Health Organization's goal of completely eradicating the disease before the end of this decade.

Thanks to vaccination, polio cases have been reduced by 99 percent over the last 20 years, saving millions of children from paralysis and restricting the spread of the condition to only a handful of countries.

Polio vaccines now protect against disease from all three types of poliovirus, with wild occurrences of the second type having already been eliminated.

Olivier Charmeil, president and chief executive officer of Sanofi Pasteur, said: "We believe that the introduction of IPV in routine polio immunisation will consolidate the tremendous progress achieved over the last decades and ensure a polio-free world for the future."

Earlier this month, the company received European regulatory approval for the six-in-one paediatric vaccine Hexyon.