The Polio Eradication Strategy 2022–26 offers a comprehensive set of actions to meet the challenge of eliminating polio from the world.

Article by PDG Murray Verso, End Polio Now Coordinator

Rotary International and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) have achieved incredible progress toward stopping polio. Since 1988, when some 350,000 children were paralysed by polio each year, the number of annual cases has been reduced by more than 99% to only 30 cases this year.

The challenge now lies in preventing the remaining 1% of cases. That’s important because this 1% provides a reservoir that can easily be transmitted to people in any country in the world.

The Polio Eradication Strategy 2022–26 offers a comprehensive set of actions to meet this challenge. It has two goals:

• Goal One is to permanently interrupt all poliovirus transmission in the last two endemic countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Goal Two is to stop circulating vaccine derived polio (cVDPV) transmission and prevent outbreaks in non-endemic countries.

The most optimistic predication is that these two goals could be achieved as early as the end of 2023 and the world would then be able to certified polio free three years later.

In October at the World Health Summit in Berlin, donors and governments stepped up to back these efforts, and pledged $2.6 billion to fund the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Pledges included USD1.2 billion from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USD150 million from Rotary International, and AUD43.5 million from the Australian Government.

At the same time, more than 3,200 scientists, physicians, and public health experts from more than 115 countries launched a Scientific Declaration on Polio Eradication, supporting the GPEI 2022-2026 Strategy and calling on the world to urgently end polio for good.

While there are still hurdles on the road to stopping transmission of wild and vaccine-derived polio and ending polio outbreaks everywhere, tactics have been honed over the last two decades to overcome them. Future progress rests on three key pillars: surveillance, vaccination, and innovation.

The world will need even more financial and political resources to support these key pillars and finish the job. Will your club be part of history and support Rotary’s efforts to end polio?