Comment on street scenes in Nigeria

Report Date: 28/05/2007

One of the remarkable things about Rotary is the network of contacts throughout the world and how we can so easily share information. Here is an example:

Saturday, May 26, 2007; Dan Garner, The Ottawa Citizen

Polio is down - we must put it out for good

In Nigeria last year, I was sitting in a car at a jammed intersection when the usual crowd of hawkers and beggars moved in, darting from window to window, desperately trying to get the sullen, sweating faces inside to turn and listen. One man lagged behind. His legs were twisted spindles and he scuttled from car to car on his hands, like a wounded crab, stopping only to raise a calloused palm to beg for a few cents. Every intersection in the poorest countries is a parade of misery, but this horror was new to me. "What could have done that to his legs?" I asked my Nigerian colleague. Polio, he said.

Of course I didn't recognize it. In this country, the ancient scourge was wiped out decades ago by vaccination and determined public health campaigns. Most Canadians below a certain age have no idea what an "iron lung" is and know nothing of the virus that filled the devices with the helpless bodies of paralysed children.

The defeat of polio in the developed world is one of civilization's glories but in 1988 the World Health Organization decided it wasn't enough. It launched a worldwide campaign to find polio wherever it lurked and defeat it, finally and absolutely. Less than a decade earlier, smallpox became the first virus to be globally eradicated. Polio would be No. 2.

The campaign swept from victory to victory. In 1988, polio was paralysing 350,000 children a year in 125 countries. Last year, polio was endemic in only four countries -- India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria -- and there were fewer than 2,000 cases. The day of triumph is near. No more paralysed children, no more beggars crawling on hands.

But something almost unimaginable has happened: The money has run out. Unless something changes very soon, the eradication effort will go into "negative cash flow" this July. If that happens, work will be scaled back. The inevitable and immediate result, according to the WHO, will be delays in responding to outbreaks and a surge in cases as the highly contagious virus spreads. Polio will even return to regions where it has been wiped out.

In 2003, a similar funding shortage contributed to a resurgence of the virus in 27 countries. It cost $500 million U.S. to fight the disease back into a corner. And now it could break out again.

So what kind of money are we talking about to finally declare victory over our ancient enemy? The 2007-2008 budget for the eradication effort is $1.27 billion U.S. The initiative has half that. And it needs another $140 million for 2009. Those may look like big numbers, but they should be kept in perspective. The United States alone spends $58.3 billion a year on terrorism preparation and prevention. And that doesn't include the cost of military ventures, including the war in Iraq, whose cost is likely to fall somewhere between one and two trillion dollars.

Or consider that last year, two New York hedge-fund managers made more than U.S. $1 billion each. According to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the top 25 hedge fund managers took home a combined $14 billion U.S. In the first four months of 2007, Wal-Mart made a profit of $2.83 billion. Over the same period, Exxon-Mobil made a profit of $9.3 billion. The movie Titanic raked in $1.8 billion at the box office alone. I could go on citing numbers like this, but I think the point is clear. There are oceans of money sloshing around, and it would take only a few bucketsful to wipe out polio forever.

And the really crazy part is that it would actually be cheaper in the long run to pay for the final eradication of polio now than to pay for ongoing control measures. In a paper published recently in The Lancet medical journal, Harvard professors Kimberly Thompson and Radboud Duintjer Tebbens conclude that "worldwide eradication of polioviruses is likely to yield substantial health and financial benefits, provided we finish the job." That's to say nothing of the human toll of failing to eradicate polio. One analysis found that moving to a strategy of "controlling" polio would allow the virus to spread and lead to four million children being attacked and paralysed over the next 20 years.

So what are our political leaders doing about this? At the G8 summit in 2005, Canada and the other rich countries committed to "continue or increase" their polio funding for 2006-2008. But as so often happens, they haven't lived up to their press releases. Canada is among the worst offenders. Far from maintaining or increasing Canada's funding, its donations have fallen by more than half.

The really astonishing thing is that, troubled as the eradication effort is, it would have collapsed altogether were it not for the Herculean efforts of a private charity. Rotary International has long crusaded for eradication and has raised more than $600 million for the cause. Its faith will be rewarded. I am sure of that. Polio will become the second virus to be globally eradicated, and the sight of human beings crawling on their hands begging for pennies will be consigned to history. I refuse to believe humanity could be so inexpressibly stupid as to let this victory slip away.

Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen