Polio fight jeopardized by withdrawal of US funding

While many experts have been predicting its imminent eradication for several years, a series of setbacks has compromised the fight against poliomyelitis. More commonly known as "polio," this disease can cause fever, headaches, vomiting, and even irreversible paralysis in approximately one in 200 infected people. Archival images of gigantic iron lungs taking over from the frozen respiratory muscles of immobilized children have cemented it in the collective imagination as an affliction from another era.

Budget cuts, a resurgence of cases in several countries, and an overall decline in childhood vaccinations worldwide are all factors that are blowing against the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), created in 1988 to put an end once and for all to this highly contagious disease, which, before vaccination became available in the 1960s, was responsible for more than 600,000 cases per year, mainly among children. "The idea was to repeat the trick of smallpox, which was definitively eradicated in 1980," explains Maël Bessaud, director of the National Reference Center for Enteroviruses and Parechoviruses at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

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