Nigeria is celebrating after the UN health agency said polio is no longer endemic in the West African country.
The World Health Organisation announcement leaves only Pakistan and its war-torn neighbour Afghanistan as countries where the disease is prevalent. Polio, which can cause life-long paralysis, can be prevented with a simple vaccination.
"It's a great moment for Nigeria," Dr Tunji Funsho, chairman of Rotary International's anti-polio campaign in Nigeria, told the Associated Press.
"We should celebrate but with a caveat that we should not let our guard down."
He attributed the success to teamwork between government and non-governmental health organisations.
Nigeria's main goal now is to maintain vigilance and make sure there are no new polio cases in the next two years so the WHO can declare it a polio-free country, Dr Funsho said.
"Until that happens we are not out of the woods yet," he said.
Once stigmatised as the world's polio epicentre, in late July Nigeria celebrated its first year with no reported case of the crippling disease, having overcome obstacles ranging from Islamic extremists who assassinated vaccinators to rumours that the vaccine was a plot to sterilise Muslims.
Just 20 years ago Nigeria was recording 1,000 polio cases a year - the highest in the world. The last recorded case of a child paralysed by the wild polio virus endemic in the country's impoverished and mainly Muslim north was on July 24 2014.
The WHO said Nigeria and Africa as a whole are now closer to being certified polio-free.
The agency warned that polio remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan and that as long as the disease exists anywhere "it's a threat to children everywhere".
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here