The Almost-Won Battle to End Polio

For someone encountering the message emblazoned on the front of the Wrigley Building in Chicago, or the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, it might have seemed like an anachronism: End Polio Now. Wasn't that disease eradicated a long time ago?

Technically, yes, in most parts of the world. (Remember all the lame boys and girls who used to populate American and British literature in early 20th century novels? Yup, that was polio, which until the 1950s used to cripple thousands of children a year in Europe and the U.S.)

Today, polio eradication efforts are among the most successful global health initiatives out there. Over the past 20 years, the World Health Organization has spent $5 billion to immunize two billion children against the disease, relegating the condition in most places to the dustbin of cultural history. Incredibly, the global number of polio cases has fallen to fewer than 2,000 new cases a year. Polio these days is still endemic in just four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

But while momentum to stop polio has been largely successful, global health advocates say that without complete eradication, over 10 million children will be paralyzed in the next 40 years.

Which is why the Rotary Club -- long a champion of the fight -- has decided to make the disease's existence into a public spectacle, plastering landmarks around the world with projections of the "End Polio Now" message.

In Egypt, Rotary Club members tackled the pyramid with the phrase; in Buenos Aires, they used the city's 220-ft tall Obelisk as a scrim. It's an extraordinary assemblage of images, one definitely worth visiting online. (The effort is being launched to back the Rotary Club's efforts to raise $200 million to match $355 million in challenge grants given by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fight polio).

Talk of polio eradication is so often an occasion for nostalgia: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1950s, the March of Dimes. It's success story, yes -- and in so many ways an American Story, as David O'Shinsky's Pulitzer Prize-winning book would have it. The story, though, didn't stop there. The movement to eradicate polio is close to a victory over a half-century in the making, but ultimately, the way it concludes is still up in the air.

To learn more, you can check out the Rotary Club's initiative here.

Photo Credit: nfalsey