For years, many experts described the eradication of poliomyelitis as imminent. A recent series of setbacks, however, is now compromising efforts to defeat the disease. More commonly known as “polio,” the disease can cause fever, headaches, vomiting and, in about one out of every 200 infections, irreversible paralysis. Archival footage of enormous iron lungs taking over immobilized children’s paralyzed respiratory muscles has etched the disease in the collective imagination as an affliction from another era.
Budget cuts, a resurgence of cases in several countries and a global decline in childhood vaccination have created strong headwinds for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which was launched in 1988 to put an end, once and for all, to this highly contagious disease. Before the advent of vaccination in the 1960s, polio caused more than 600,000 cases per year, mainly among children. “The idea was to repeat what was done with smallpox, which was eradicated for good in 1980,” said Maël Bessaud, director of the National Reference Center for Enterovirus and Parechovirus at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
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