Eliminating Polio
The 17-year effort to eradicate polio from the world appears to be back on track after nearly unraveling in the past three years.A new strategy of using a vaccine targeting the dominant strain of the virus appears to have eliminated polio from Egypt, one of six countries where it was freely circulating. That approach is on the verge of doing the same in India. Twenty-five years ago, India had 200,000 cases of paralytic polio a year. A decade ago, it was still seeing 75,000 cases annually. Through November this year, it recorded 52.
Such dramatic successes, many the result of a more potent formulation of polio vaccine, have once again made eradication of the paralyzing viral disease a realistic goal. Only one human disease — smallpox — has ever been wiped out, and that was almost three decades ago.
It is probably no exageration to say that the elimination of smallpox was mankind’s greatest accomplishment of the 20th century. Powered flight, walking on the moon, and building a global computer network to deliver pornography are all great accomplishments, but eliminating smallpox has saved millions of lives. It is something we can all be proud of. Polio needs to go as well.
