The World Health Organization has announced the spread of polio is an international public health emergency that is threatening to infect other countries with the crippling disease, BBC News reported.
Outbreaks in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were described as an "extraordinary event" requiring a coordinated "international response" the agency said in an announcement on Monday.
Countries previously free of the disease, such as Syria, Somalia and Iraq, are continuously seeing the virus pop up, experts said. Civil war or unrest in those countries complicates efforts to contain the virus.
Recommending citizens of affected countries to carry a vaccination certificate while traveling abroad, the agency said Pakistan, Cameroon, and Syria "pose the greatest risk of further wild poliovirus exportations in 2014."
The WHO recorded 417 cases of polio worldwide for the whole of 2013. For 2014, it had already recorded 68 cases by 30 April - up from 24 in the same period last year, according to BBC News.
Polio usually affects children under five and is transmitted through contaminated food and water. After multiplying in the intestine, the virus can invade the nervous system, causing paralysis in one in every 200 infections.
The virus can cause death of the infected person within hours. Several vaccines exist to treat and cure the disease.
"The conditions for a public health emergency of international concern have been met," said Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director General.
"The international spread of polio to date in 2014 constitutes an 'extraordinary event' and a public health risk to other states for which a co-ordinated international response is essential," the WHO's International Health Regulations Emergency Committee said in statement.
"If unchecked, this situation could result in failure to eradicate globally one of the world's most serious vaccine preventable diseases."
Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Somalia and Nigeria are also listed by the WHO as "posing an ongoing risk for new wild poliovirus exportations in 2014."
"The polio virus is endemic in just three countries - Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. But attacks on vaccination campaigns in Pakistan in particular have allowed the virus to spread across borders," BBC News reported.
"Syria, which was polio-free for 14 years, was re-infected with the virus from Pakistan."
