The Fight to Eradicate Polio

On today's World Polio Day, humanity is faced with a resurgence of the disease. Case numbers rose majorly once again due to disruption during the coronavirus pandemic but new outbreaks also keep occurring in conflict zones and places with low vaccination rates. After years of fighting hard against the disease and its spread, Africa was certified free from endemic wild polio in 2020, with the last indigenous case of wild polio recorded in 2016 in Nigeria. As this infographic using World Health Organization data shows, wild polio is still endemic in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

With the eradication of endemic polio in India and later the African continent, polio cases fell to a low of just 42 in 2016 before rising to the triple digits again in 2017 and 2018. 2019 already saw more than 500 new cases once again due to large clusters in Pakistan as well as vaccine-derived outbreaks among undervaccinated populations in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African countries. Cases reached more than 1,200 in 2020 as 23 million children worldwide failed to receive basic immunizations due to Covid dispruptions.

While public health professionals stress that the world is in the late phases of eradicating endemic wild polio, it has still struggled to go the last mile. Experts interviewed on the subject point out that stengthening national health systems and decision makers in affected countries as well as tight surveillance will be necessary to wipe out endemic polio once and for all. They also caution that despite the recent resurgence, the world is historically still within the window to realize this opportunity. In the area of vaccine-derived polio, which originates from excreted and mutated oral vaccine remnants that can gain a hold in unvaccinated populations, new oral vaccines as well as polio shots can help mitigate infections.

In 2024, cases were down again to around 400, as outbreaks of wild and vaccine-derived polio continued in Gaza, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen. In 2025, cases look to stay below 250, as of the most current data.