Eradication of polio

A public health effort to eliminate all cases of poliomyelitis (polio) infection around the world, begun in 1988 and led by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the Rotary Foundation, has reduced the number of annual diagnosed cases from the hundreds of thousands to fewer than 100 in 2015. Of the three strains of the polio virus, the last recorded wild case of type 2 was in 1999. The last recorded case of type 3 was on 11 November 2012. All reported cases since 11 November 2012 have been of type 1. If polio is the next disease to be successfully eradicated, this will represent only the third time this has ever been achieved, after smallpox and rinderpest. The goal of eradicating polio worldwide has attracted international and media attention, with a reduction of some 99% of cases in the last quarter of the 20th century. The first 10 years of the 21st century saw only erratic progress in further reducing the number of cases, which led to getting rid of the last 1% being described as "like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death". Since 2011 incidence rates of the disease have dramatically reduced, and with large reductions continuing through to 2016, hopes for eliminating polio have been rekindled. India is the latest country to have officially stopped endemic transmission of polio—with its last reported case in 2011. Only 3 countries remain where the disease is endemic—Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. The number of wild polio cases reported in 2015 was less than a third of the previous lowest year, 2012, while 2016 showed a further dramatic decrease.

Eradication of polio has been defined in various ways—as elimination of the occurrence of poliomyelitis even in the absence of human intervention, as extinction of poliovirus, such that the infectious agent no longer exists in nature or in the laboratory, as control of an infection to the point at which transmission of the disease ceased within a specified area, and as reduction of the worldwide incidence of poliomyelitis to zero as a result of deliberate efforts, and requiring no further control measures.

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