Polio is not near elimination

[Letter to the Globe and Mail, never published]

I hate to burst Margaret Wente’s post-Christmas feel-good bubble, but Africa did not have a year without polio, at least not if you care about the symptoms (sudden onset juvenile paralysis). The problem is that the World Health Organization calls this Acute Flaccid Paralysis if poliovirus is not found. And this is not a trivial problem because cases have risen from about 14,000 in 1996, the first year for which WHO bothered to collect statistics, and have been over 100,000 a year since 2011.

Margaret Wente apparently doesn’t know about this. WHO just documents it. And even when people are informed, they don’t seem to care. Because deep down westerners care about disease in poor countries only when they fear it might spread. And although WHO claims ignorance as to the cause, they have admitted that some of the cases are probably caused by exposure to pesticides. But who cares about children dying from poverty and pollution in lands far away? Certainly not WHO. Probably not you.

WHO Polio and AFP Statistics