The massive worldwide initiative to eradicate polio begun in the 1980s by the World Health Organization (WHO) has been highly effective, such that the rate of 1000 children a day paralyzed by the disease has been reduced to 100 a year. Yet the effort to cross the last mile towards eradicating the disease is ongoing.
“Coffee with Polio Experts,” a series of videos by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), chronicles the efforts of “field commanders” – doctors and other experts on the ground – to combat the disease. Over a cup of coffee, they reflect on the reasons for their successes as well as the kinds of the obstacles that they have faced in war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In one video, Dr. Naveed Sadozai – a recently retired senior epidemiologist at GPEI – speaks of land mines and attack dogs that hindered early, but eventually successful, efforts to get children vaccinated in Afghanistan. In another, WHO’s Middle East polio expert Chris Maher explains how the eradication campaign has eventually stopped the assassinations of vaccinators by the Pakistani Taliban, and gotten back on track. Dr. Ousmane Diop, laboratory expert from WHO’s Global Polio Laboratory Network, relates how the presence of the virus has become ever less prevalent in the samples he sees, now that political tensions have eased and efforts to win local acceptance have been successful.
To learn more about innovative approaches to polio eradication, check out the Incubator’s curated resource collection about global efforts to tackle the disease. The collection was curated to augment The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s recent event, “Eradicating Polio: Reaching the Last Child.”