End Polio Now

After 20 years of hard work, Rotary and its partners are on the brink of eradicating this tenacious disease, but a strong push is needed now to root it out once and for all. It is a window of opportunity of historic proportions.

The global effort to eradicate polio has been $5 billion initiative. Since 1988 it has reduced the number of polio-endemic countries to four and cleared 99 percent of the virus from the world. Rotary has led the way, with an investment of $650 million by the time the world is certified polio-free.

Yet the goal of polio eradication remains elusive, with four countries still polio-endemic. In recent years, some in the scientific community have raised a difficult question: Can the world eradicate polio, or should we try to contain it?

According to an article by Harvard researchers, controlling the disease would be far more costly than eradicating it. The developing world can save more than $1 billion a year by eradicating, while switching to a control strategy would condemn 10 million children to polio over the next 40 years alone.