Sixty years ago smallpox was endemic across much of the
world, killing two million people each year. In 1959 an international programme
to eliminate the virus was started, not least because it was a disease amenable
to large-scale vaccination. In 1977, the last case was diagnosed and recorded.
It had taken just eighteen years to achieve the elimination
of the entire disease in the wild.
This was the first-ever case of a major disease organism
being destroyed in the wild, and there has only been one other - far less
well-known. This is rinderpest, a dangerous viral infection
most common in cattle. It took several
decades to exterminate, but success finally came in 2001.
A third disease has been the target of attempts at total
elimination. This is poliomyelitis, which in the 1980s still
infected hundreds of thousands of people. Polio is particularly prone to attack
children and can leave them with severe impairments that can last a lifetime.
Poliomyelitis has been subject to an intensive programme of vaccination. By
2012, substantial success had been achieved, with only 223 cases diagnosed and
the virus remaining endemic in three countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. The
programme had been coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and
backed by Unicef, though much of the funding - $850 million over two decades -
came from the Rotary Foundation, Where infection remains and is increasing are
conflict-zones -it has risen in Afghanistan, spread to Syria and Iraq, and
moved from Cameroon to Guinea.
The WHO is now calling for a huge new effort to curb the spread of polio through
much tighter controls on travelling from endemic areas and a renewed emphasis
on childhood vaccination. More generally, what is happening with polio is a
stark reminder of how warfare can multiply susceptibility to disease among populations
already damaged by poverty and insecurity.
2014 is the beginning of a long commemoration of the first
world war that is estimated to have killed 11 million people. The appalling aftermath of the war is less remembered: an
influenza epidemic, often termed “Spanish flu”, which started in 1918, was
spread partly by troop movements and took hold among the weakened populations
of an impoverished Europe. The human cost is not certain even now but may have been
far in excess of 25 million people worldwide.
The disease was made worse by the war itself - and in human
terms was even more of a killer. Polio will not reach the same extent as
Spanish flu. But the risk of a pandemic is growing. [Abridged]
This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Paul Rogers is professor in the department
of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is Open
Democracy's international-security editor, and writes a weekly column on global
security
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