We cannot afford to give up our fight against polio now

We should not allow the COVID-19 pandemic to erase the progress we have made towards eradicating polio.

I joined Rotary’s efforts to eradicate polio more than two decades ago, shortly after meeting a mother in Karachi, Pakistan, who was struggling to carry her 11-year-old son whose legs had withered from polio paralysis. She told me that the virus paralysed three of her six children – a shocking fact given that the disease is easily preventable with a vaccine. This encounter underscored to me the urgency of getting to zero cases. Back then, wild polio was paralysing more than 1,000 children every year in my native Pakistan, and 45 countries were still recording cases. Today, the wild virus is still being seen in Pakistan and just one other country – Afghanistan. Five out of six world regions are wild polio-free. This progress is a testament to the collaboration between health workers, governments and donors around the world, and the coordinating efforts of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which Rotary helped found in 1988.