When will polio finally be eradicated? After the declines recorded in 2022, when around ten new cases were reported in Pakistan after months without reports, and others in London, New York and Israel, optimism is returning among the main players in the fight against this disease.
“We are on the verge of eradicating polio from the face of the Earth”declared, Wednesday October 11, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, after the announcement of funding of 500 million euros against the disease, from a partnership between the European Union, the European Investment Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), recipient of the funds, welcomed in a press release an endowment which reaches a “decisive moment” and the “take it a step closer” of its objective.
Polio, a highly contagious disease which initially manifests itself with symptoms suggestive of a flu-like illness, causes irreversible paralysis – most often of the lower limbs – in approximately one case in two hundred. The virus develops in the mucous membranes of the pharynx and in the small intestine, before damaging the nervous system which controls body movements. The disease can also cause death from paralysis of the respiratory muscles.
Between October 11, 2022 and October 10, 2023, 558 cases of paralysis were recorded around the world, according to IMEP. Yet while prevalence has fallen since the launch of the GPEI in 1988, when the number of cases reached 350,000 according to the World Health Organization (WHO), challenges remain on the path to extinction. . Among the three wild strains of poliovirus, strain 2 was declared eradicated in 1999 and strain 3 in 2020. That leaves strain 1, which remains endemic in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, where the supply of vaccine is proving very difficult.
Disadvantages of the oral vaccine
Good news, according to Aidan O’Leary, director of IMEP, “We have never seen such a geographic concentration of cases in these two countries.” According to him, the nine cases recently recorded are in only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and in only one of Pakistan’s 170 districts. “We are a hair’s breadth away” to end the endemic presence of polio in the region, according to Mr. O’Leary, who expects that this last chain of transmission of the wild strain of the virus will be broken “in the coming months”.
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