See More Sites Dealing with Polio Eradication
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Even if the eradication effort misses its first deadline, it has already produced impressive results: from 1988 to 1998, the number of cases of poliomyelitis worldwide dropped from 35,000 to 5,673, or 85 percent. The last case of the disease in the Western hemisphere was found in Peru in 1991, and the last case in the WHO's Western Pacific region was found in Cambodia in 1997. Reservoirs of the disease remain in Africa and Southeast Asia, and outbreaks have also occurred in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At a meeting in May 1999, representatives of the WHO's Regional Office for Southeast Asia urged member nations to improve vaccine coverage beyond the already impressive rate of nearly 90 percent. The theme of the meeting, held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was "Immunize every child because every child counts." The WHO Southeast Asia Region represents over 25 percent of the world's population and includes 10 member countries: Bhutan, Bangladesh, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. The region also reports more than half of the wold's polio cases each year.
Delegates to June meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the governing body of the WHO, echoed the call for intensifying the polio eradication campaign. Rotary International, a nonprofit organization which has played a leading role in polio control, addressed Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's new Director-General, to offer its 1.4 million volunteers as "foot soldiers" in the eradication effort. Though some observers have suggested that the campaign may take until 2003 to eliminate paralytic polio, the WHA delegates asserted that the year 2000 was still a reasonable goal.
Dr. Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and the first woman to head the WHO, stated that "Poliovirus is now on the verge of extinction ... We have travelled farther and faster than many would have predicted." But Dr. Brundtland cautioned that "one of the paradoxes of an eradication initiative is that control efforts must be intensified as the disease disappears. We need to accelerate house-to-house delivery of the vaccine ... and continue negotiations with warring parties, and we need to improve surveillance systems so that every paralyzed child is investigated for polio and we can confidently say that countries, regions, and eventually the entire world are polio-free."
The governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as Rotary International and UNICEF, are providing funding for the eradication effort, the remainder of which is expected to cost approximately US$500 million.
-Alan Dove, New York
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