The impact of surveillance and other factors on detection of emergent and circulating vaccine derived polioviruses

Background: Circulating vaccine derived poliovirus (cVDPV) outbreaks remain a threat to polio eradication. To reduce cases of polio from cVDPV of serotype 2, the serotype 2 component of the vaccine has been removed from the global vaccine supply, but outbreaks of cVDPV2 have continued. The objective of this work is to understand the factors associated with later detection in order to improve detection of these unwanted events. Methods: The number of nucleotide differences between each cVDPV outbreak and the oral polio vaccine (OPV) strain was used to approximate the time from emergence to detection. Only independent emergences were included in the analysis. Variables such as serotype, surveillance quality, and World Health Organization (WHO) region were tested in a negative binomial regression model to ascertain whether these variables were associated with higher nucleotide differences upon detection. Results: In total, 74 outbreaks were analysed from 24 countries between 2004-2019. For serotype 1 (n=10), the median time from seeding until outbreak detection was 572 (95% uncertainty interval (UI) 279-2016), for serotype 2 (n=59), 276 (95% UI 172-765) days, and for serotype 3 (n=5), 472 (95% UI 392-603) days. Significant improvement in the time to detection was found with increasing surveillance of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) and adequate stool collection. Conclusions: cVDPVs remain a risk; all WHO regions have reported at least one VDPV outbreak since the first outbreak in 2000 and outbreak response campaigns using monovalent OPV type 2 risk seeding future outbreaks. Maintaining surveillance for poliomyelitis after local elimination is essential to quickly respond to both emergence of VDPVs and potential importations as low-quality AFP surveillance causes outbreaks to continue undetected. Considerable variation in the time between emergence and detection of VDPVs were apparent, and other than surveillance quality and inclusion of environmental surveillance, the reasons for this remain unclear.