Russia has confirmed its first death from polio in more than a decade, the country's top public health official said on Sunday. A citizen of the former-Soviet Central Asian country of Uzbekistan died of polio in the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg in early June, Interfax news agency quoted Gennady Onishchenko as saying. "Tests have confirmed this," he said. Onishchenko's spokeswoman was unavailable to comment on the report on Sunday. Polio was practically eradicated as a public health problem in industrialized countries in the 1960s, but remains endemic in seven countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Russia last month confirmed its first case in 13 years in an infant visiting from Tajikistan, where at least 12 people have died from a polio outbreak this year, Reuters reported.
