In Sight: A World Without Polio

▪ 2005

      Reinvigorated immunization efforts to eradicate poliomyelitis (polio) from the world led a UNICEF official in Nigeria, where an outbreak had left more than 700 children paralyzed in 2004, to express confidence that polio had “no hiding place anymore.” The immunization program had its beginnings in 1988, when the World Health Organization (WHO), buoyed by the success of the global smallpox eradication campaign (which had been completed a decade earlier), determined that it was technically feasible to purge the world of a second ancient scourge. In partnership with UNICEF, Rotary International, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, WHO launched the largest public-health campaign ever undertaken, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).

      Polio, a highly communicable viral disease that mainly affects young children, can invade the nervous system and cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours. Although only one infection in 200 leads to paralysis, all who are infected shed poliovirus in their feces, which allows the disease to spread rapidly, especially among persons who live in crowded conditions with poor sanitation. About 80% of the children in a given region must be fully immunized against polio in order to stop the chain of person-to-person transmission. The GPEI's strategy was straightforward: vaccinate every child under age five with three or four doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the 125 countries where polio still crippled an estimated 350,000 youngsters a year.

      In 2001 there were fewer than 400 cases of paralytic polio in the world, and the end of the crippling disease seemed tantalizingly close. A 2002 polio epidemic in India increased the number of cases to 1,900, but public-health workers drove the number of cases worldwide down to fewer than 800 in 2003. Sixteen years and more than $3.1 billion after the program began, at least two billion children had been protected against polio, and the GPEI partners believed that “the world had an unprecedented opportunity to finish the job [of eradicating polio] in 2004.” That optimism belied the fact that a scenario was unfolding in Africa that threatened to undo years of progress that had been so painstakingly achieved. In the northern Nigerian state of Kano, Muslim leaders were not allowing children to receive OPV because, they contended, the vaccine contained hormones that would sterilize Muslim girls. (Some also believed the vaccine would give recipients HIV.) In August 2003 the state governor suspended the immunization program. Predictably, as immunization levels plummeted, northern Nigeria became the epicentre of a polio outbreak that ultimately spread to 12 previously polio-free countries in western and central Africa.

      International public health officials, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Nigeria's most powerful sultan put pressure on Kano's leaders to have the suspension lifted, and Kano's governor relented when tests of OPV conducted in independent laboratories demonstrated its purity. Polio immunization of the state's four million children under age five resumed in late July (with vaccine that was produced in Indonesia, a Muslim country). In October and November tens of thousands of volunteers overcame many difficulties to administer drops of OPV into the mouths of nearly 80 million children in 23 African countries. Despite the devastating 11-month setback, at the end of 2004 the GPEI partners stood ready to finish in one year the formidable job of ending polio forever.

Ellen Bernstein

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