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Global incidence of polio has decreased by 99.9 per cent since the establishment of Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, the initiative is now keen on eradicating the 0.1 per cent of polio cases.

Initiative is spearheaded by national governments, WHO, Rotary International, Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef).

“The goal of GPEI is to complete the eradication and containment of all wild, vaccine-related and Sabin polio-viruses, so no child suffers from paralytic poliomyelitis ever again,” Dr Ghebreyesus said.

He was speaking during an online discussion with Rotary International President Jennifer Jones.

He also said GPEI has helped countries to make huge progress in protecting the global population from this debilitating disease, adding that cases were down from 350,000 a year to just six  the last one year. 

“Despite cases reaching a record low last year, we have seen an increase this year, with 20 cases in Pakistan, two in Afghanistan and six in Mozambique,” he said.

An estimated 20 million people, who would otherwise have been paralysed by the disease, are walking today.

Another more than 1.5 million people are alive, whose lives would otherwise have been lost. 

Meanwhile, Ghebreyesus said a case of vaccine-derived polio in the US, and discovery of polio-virus in sewage in the United Kingdom, shows polio will remain a global threat until it is eradicated everywhere.

“We still face many challenges, including misinformation, hard-to-access populations, and community fatigue. Historic backsliding of immunisation programmes, which deliver polio vaccines to most of the world’s children, has added to the challenges,” he added.

According to Ghebreyesus, eradicating a disease is not simple or straightforward, saying without concerted action, we could lose the gains the world has made. 

At the World Health Summit in Berlin, he said donors including Rotary committed $2.6 billion to fund the strategy to help get us to the finish line.