Final effort needed to defeat polio.
Many Canadians are old enough to remember the horror of polio. In
the1950s and ’60s, polio killed thousands of children and left countless
others living in iron lungs or with life-long paralysis. With the
development of effective vaccines, we thought we had seen the end of
this terrible disease. We were wrong.
The World Health Organization recently predicted a global polio
emergency in Pakistan within three months. In 2011, 73 new cases were
reported there, nearly equal to all the cases in the previous five
years. Polio is now 99 per cent eradicated globally, but without
immediate action, the number of children paralyzed each year is expected
rise to 200,000 in a decade. We are failing at the very moment of our
victory over this terrible crippler of children.
