The Long Campaign Against Polio

Polio, a virus that can cause paralysis, mainly affects young children. Vaccines developed by Jonas Salk (1955) and Albert Sabin (oral vaccine, early 1960s) made eradication possible. In 1988 the World Health Assembly launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a partnership including the WHO, UNICEF, the US CDC and Rotary International, which had begun its PolioPlus campaign in 1985. Cases of wild polio fell by more than 99 percent from an estimated 350,000 in 1988.

Two of the three wild poliovirus types were certified eradicated, type 2 in 2015 and type 3 in 2019, and Africa was certified free of wild polio in 2020. The final steps have proved hard, because of conflict, remote areas and, in some places, rumours and mistrust that led communities to refuse vaccination. The polio campaign shows that eradication depends as much on trust and local relationships as on vaccines.