GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) Friday declared Europe and Central Asia free of polio, a highly infectious disease that once paralyzed thousands of children every year.

The declaration came after no indigenous cases were registered for three years in the WHO's 51-country European region, which stretches from Greenland to Turkey and across the Russian Federation and the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union.

"This is a tremendous achievement in the global effort to eradicate polio," said WHO regional director for Europe Marc Danzon.

But officials warned that nobody could be entirely safe until the disease was eliminated worldwide and called on countries to finance the $275 million still needed to complete global eradication by a 2005 target date.

Polio is caused by a virus that invades the nervous system and can lead to total paralysis or even death. It mainly affects children under five.

In 2001, an outbreak occurred among Roma children in Bulgaria, but the virus was found to have traveled from northern India. This did not count as the incident was not indigenous, meaning that the source did not lie in Europe.

The European region became the third WHO region to be certified as free of polio after the Americas, in 1994, and the Western Pacific two years ago.

Polio cases worldwide have dropped from an estimated 350,000 in 1988, when the United Nations agency launched its campaign to stamp out the disease, to just 480 reported cases in 10 polio-endemic countries in 2001.

The disease remains endemic in Afghanistan, Angola, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan.

While applauding the eradication of polio in Europe, the WHO warned that vaccination programs must continue because the disease could still be brought in from outside.

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