How To Get Rid Of Polio For Good? There's A $5 Billion Plan
Polio is on the verge of being eliminated. Last year there were just over 200 cases of polio, and they occurred in just two remote parts of the world — northern Nigeria and the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border region.
A new $5.5 billion plan being pushed by the World Health Organization strives to eliminate polio entirely, phase out vaccination campaigns and secure polio vaccine stockpiles in case the virus somehow manages to re-emerge.
If the effort is successful, polio would be just the second disease in human history, after smallpox, to be eliminated by medical science.
"We've never been so close to eradication as we are now," says Hamid Jafari, the director of Global Polio Eradication at WHO.
A quarter of a century ago there were roughly 300,000 polio cases a year worldwide. By 2011 that number had dropped to 650, and last year it was down to 223.
The new Global Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan aims to bring the number of new wild polio cases down to zero by 2015 and eradicate the virus entirely by 2018. It targets "wild" polio from normal transmission and the handful of so-called "vaccine-derived" cases, which are caused by the vaccine.
The plan calls for an orchestrated global transition from the oral vaccine, which contains live polio virus (and thus can cause "vaccine-derived" polio paralysis), to an injected vaccine made from dead virus.
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