Global eradication of polio ‘tantalisingly close’ with UK urged to keep up funding

After no reported cases of wild polio for 19 weeks, vaccination efforts boosted at last endemic spots in Pakistan and Afghanistan

The world is “tantalisingly close” to eradicating polio – with no confirmed cases of wild polio anywhere so far this year. But experts warn that vaccination efforts – and funding – must not falter if the world is to rid itself of a human infectious disease for the second time in history, after smallpox.

There have been no reported cases of wild polio infection in people for the last 19 weeks. Figures from the World Health Organization reveal that the last confirmed cases were on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan in October and September 2023 respectively; these are the last nations on Earth where polio is endemic.

“To have gone 19 straight weeks … is a long period to go without a single case, that’s why there is some hope [of eradication],” Gordon McInally, president of Rotary International, a founding partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), told the Observer. “All of us who are involved in this, every week we get an email giving us the updated figures … and every week when I click open that email my heart rate goes up until I see the number in the hope that it will be zero and not one, or worse. But we take it week by week.”