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Polio: The Human Race Reached a Huge Milestone Today . . .
an article by Mark Leon Goldberg, UN Dispatch
The UN-backed effort to wipe polio off the face of
the earth reached has reached a major milestone.
Exactly three years ago today — January 13, 2011 —
a young girl in West Bengal State, India was
diagnosed with Polio. She was the last person in
India to ever have contracted the virus.
click on photo to enlarge
There have been no new infections in the last
three years in India, meaning that the World
Health Organization can officially certify that a
virus that was endemic for centuries in India has
now become eradicated from it. This will likely
happen next month.
This is a huge public health accomplishment.
Before the G
lobal Polio Eradication Initiative was
launched in 1988, India was the country with by
far the highest disease burden. Some 200,000
Indian children contracted Polio each year. By
2010, there were only 42 cases. By 2011, just that
one case. And for the past three years, zero new
cases.
How did this happen? International philanthropies
like Rotary International and the Gates
Foundation, the United Nations and local
government partners came together in an
unprecedented way to provide the funding and
political will required to vaccinate hundreds of
millions of Indian children. Over 2 million people
were hired as Polio workers, to promote buy-in
from local populations and to make sure that even
the most hard-to-reach communities were brought
the vaccine. It was a massive undertaking,
logistically, politically and financially — and it
worked.
There are still three countries where polio is
endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.
Imported cases of Polio were also reported in
Syria last year — the first time in 14 years —
amid a total breakdown of that country’s public
health infrastructure and the WHO is in the midst
of a massive vaccination
campaign in the Middle East to try and contain
the virus.
To be sure, the outbreak in Syria and ongoing
local cases in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria
are a setback in the effort to rid the world of
this scourge, but it is worth putting the fight
against Polio in a larger historical context. For
hundreds of years, this virus debilitated millions
of children around the world. The vaccine was
discovered in 1955, and by the mid-to-late 1970s
most western countries were rid of the disease.
But Polio doesn’t respect borders, so the
international community began dreaming up
strategies to bring the vaccine to the developing
world and in the mid-1980s the international
community boldly committed to wiping this historic
scourge from the face of the earth. It was an
audacious objective, but one that is now eminently
reachable.
The lesson here is that we should not be afraid to
dream big in public health. If we can end Polio,
we can eradicate measles or even AIDS. Thanks to
the Global Polio Eradication Initiative we know
that such goals are not only worthwhile–but
absolutely achievable.
[Note: Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN
reporter for this article.]
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