Ghost Viruses And The Taliban Stand In The Way Of Wiping Out Polio
The World Health Organization is celebrating the eradication of another strain of the polio virus. Yet major challenges remain in the global effort to get rid of the disease.
In the incredibly ambitious, multibillion dollar effort to wipe polio off the face of the planet, there's currently good news and bad news.
The good news, says Michel Zaffran, who runs the World Health Organization's global polio eradication program, is that there's hardly any polio left.
"When we started back in 1988," Zaffran says. "We had cases in 125 countries and 300,000 cases every year."
Last year what WHO refers to as "wild" polio was found only in two countries — Pakistan and Afghanistan. And it crippled fewer than a hundred kids. Wild polio is the traditional virus as opposed to "vaccine-derived" polio — which we'll explain in
