The Final Battle Against Polio?

There’s no one place a virus goes to die — but that doesn’t make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out. In the developed world, vaccines have made once-common scourges such as measles, rubella, mumps and whooping cough rare to the point of near-extinction. Only once, however, has any virus been flushed from its last redoubts in both the body and the wild and effectively vaccinated out of existence. That virus was smallpox, which ceased to exist outside high-security labs in 1977. Since that day, humanity has been free to put the vaccines against the disease — and the terror its periodic outbreaks would cause — on the shelf forever.

Now we are tantalizingly close to another such epic moment. This time the disease in the medical cross hairs is polio, and there’s no minimizing the progress made against it. Just 25 years ago, polio was endemic to 125 countries and would paralyze or kill up to 350,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them children — each year. Now the disease has been run to ground in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and in 2012, it struck only 215 people worldwide. Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last. Read More ...