DON'T TELL THE ANTI-VAXERS--AFRICA HAS NOW BEEN DECLARED WILD POLIO FREE

In a celebration-worthy achievement, the wild polio virus has now been eradicated across the entire African continent. The August, 2020 victory declaration follows four years without a single case of the deadly paralytic disease caused by the wild polio virus anywhere in Africa.

This represents an enormous success for the decades long worldwide program, led by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund and the Rotary Foundation, to eradicate polio worldwide.

Child receiving oral polio vaccine--Credit: UNICEF 

There are three types of wild polio virus. Of these, two have been eliminated worldwide, and now exist only in laboratories. The remaining virus, Type 1, survives in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it has sickened 105 people, mostly children, so far this year.

When the global polio eradication initiative kicked off in 1988, an estimated 350,000 people were paralyzed or killed by poliomyelitis every year. In the United States alone, in 1952, there were more than 57,000 cases, more than 21,000 leading to paralysis, and more than 3,000 deaths. 

While the current near-eradication of polio represents one of humanity's greatest successes in disease control, much more work remains. The oral polio vaccine that has been the core of the eradication program relies on live, but weakened rather than inactivated poliovirus. Very rarely, the weakened virus can accumulate mutations that allow it to cause disease outbreaks again. In recent years there have been as many or more vaccine-derived polio cases than those caused by the wild virus. 

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The end game--finally eradicating the wild virus everywhere while concurrently stopping the transmission of vaccine-derived cases is complicated but within reach.

In the meantime, for the first time in human history, people on six of Earth's continents--more than 90 percent of the world's population--are free from this deadly disease.