Despite all the scientific advances of the past 100 years, eradicating a cruel and debilitating diseases such as polio remains challenging. Yet, for all its difficulty, erasing an entire illness from the story of humanity is an achievement that has been met before.
In 1967, the World Health Organisation announced a final push to end smallpox – a sickness that claimed the lives of millions down the centuries. Ten years later, the last natural case of the virus was recorded in Somalia. In 1980, the WHO was able to officially announce that the disease had been eradicated.
The lesson learnt from this success story was that a determined and well-funded campaign of vaccination
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