NEW DELHI, JAN 13- India marked three years since its last reported Polio case on Monday, meaning it will soon be certified as having defeated Polio in a huge advance for global eradication efforts.

India’s polio programme is one of the country’s biggest public health success stories.

Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, along with global groups who have been working to eradicate the virus, hailed Monday’s anniversary as “a monumental milestone”.

“We have completed a full three years without a single polio case and I’m sure that in the future there won’t be any polio cases,” Azad told reporters in the capital. “I think this is great news not just for India but the entire globe,” he added.

“In 2012, there were the fewest numbers of cases in endemic countries as ever before. So far in 2013 (records are still being checked), there were even less,” Hamid Jafari, global polio expert at the World Health Organisation, told.

There are also reasons for caution in India, with the virus still considered endemic in neighbouring Pakistan, where vaccinators are being killed by the Taliban which views them as possible spies.

The country’s success was built on a huge vaccination programme that began in the mid-1990s with the backing of the central government and a coalition of charities, private donors and UN agencies.

India reported 150,000 cases of paralytic polio in 1985, and it still accounted for half of all cases globally in 2009, with 741 infections that led to paralysis.

Jafari from the WHO highlighted the immense knock-on benefits for India, which is still afflicted by other preventable diseases, widespread malnutrition and poor sanitation.

“India has now set other important public health goals as a result of the confidence that the country has got from the successful eradication of polio,” he said, citing a new measles eradication goal.

Health minister Azad said the next priorities were tackling non-communicable diseases such as a cancer and diabetes but he conceded that the government needed to spend more on improving health services.

“In proportion to the GDP (gross domestic product), unfortunately we don’t spend that much money, as much as we should spend,” he told reporters.