Via The Atlantic.com: Why Polio Just Became a Global Health Crisis—and a Global Governance Crisis. Excerpt:
Few people probably associate the phrase "global health emergency" with polio, a disease that has been around for 5000 years and is on a decades-long decline so steep that there are less than a thousand recorded cases left on Earth, and it no longer even seems real to many in the developed world. "Global health emergency" might sound applicable to HIV/AIDS, malaria, or cancer, but polio?
And yet, that is exactly what happened late last Friday afternoon in Geneva, when the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, declared polio a public health emergency, calling for the 194 member states to fully fund the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and fill the currently $945 million gap in its budget for 2012-13.
But this is about much more than just filling a budget shortfall: polio's threat is still very real, and the mission to finally stamp it out forever is a crucial one for reasons even bigger than the disease itself.
Since the world decided to come together to eradicate polio in 1988, the disease has been almost entirely eliminated. It killed or paralysed more than 350,000 children each year in the 1980s, but there were just 650 recorded cases in 2011. In January, India celebrated its first polio-free year in history, leaving the disease endemic in just three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The latest figures from the World Health Organization show only 60 cases so far in 2012.
But polio is a different type of emergency than the ones we usually hear about in the news. Its biggest danger isn't the current number of cases, but the implications for failure: not only because a failure to eradicate could allow for a resurgence that could kill or disable thousands of children each year, but because of what it holds for the effectiveness of our global health systems itself.
