World Polio Day: Eradicating a virus that slips through borders needs collective effort

As a region, we have never been better poised to make history – the kind of history we and our children and grandchildren can speak of with pride. For more than three decades, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has driven a spectacularly successful effort to rid the world of a needlessly debilitating, easily preventable but ferociously communicable disease: polio. Today, endemic wild poliovirus infects children in just two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan . What’s more, its geographic foothold in these countries is smaller than ever before, as the virus has been dislodged from its historic endemic strongholds. This amounts to a perfect window of opportunity, and history will be made when humanity steps through it. Why aren’t we through it yet? It’s incredibly hard to mobilise the kind of engagement, expertise and funding needed to consign polio to history. Our region is the last in the world where wild poliovirus still circulates. We’re also, along with the African region, struggling to end outbreaks of variant poliovirus, which have the same effect as wild poliovirus on the infected child: permanent paralysis. The guard against poliovirus infection is vaccine-induced population immunity through consistently high levels of vaccination in all children. But conflict, mass population movement, floods, famine, weak healthcare systems and insecurity make that hard, and there is a direct correlation between immunity levels and accessibility. In short, where children can be accessed with vaccines, children can be protected. But the ownership of this problem isn’t just Afghanistan’s or Pakistan’s, or something that is happening in Somalia or Yemen that the rest of us don’t need to worry about. As member states of the region, Qatar and the UAE have a vital role in ensuring we get through this window before it closes. This means galvanising political commitment, fostering regional solidarity with affected countries, mobilising funds and, wherever possible, ensuring that funding is flexible so it can be quickly targeted as needed in an emergency context. Countries at high risk of polio outbreaks also have a clear role, and that is around forming a bulwark against poliovirus through robust routine immunisation and highly sensitive surveillance for poliovirus. This is about preventing outbreaks before they start, and rapidly detecting and tackling any transmission that does take root. We also need to applaud the domestic funding coming from countries in outbreak – we need more of this. History has shown us, again and again, the craftiness of this virus. How it slips across borders in the bodies of children, how it seeks out the unprotected in any community and robs them of mobility. A virus like this isn’t someone else’s job to stop – it is a burden that falls on us all. As a region, it is all our responsibility to each other, to our children, and ultimately the world, to eradicate polio. Together, we call on the member states of our region to sustain and further focus both national and regional commitments to stop endemic polio. We thank all international and sovereign donors for their support and encourage them to sustain it through this final phase. The State of Qatar continues to play a pivotal role in facilitating the delivery of health and humanitarian services to Afghanistan’s children and families after the recent political transition, and the UAE under leadership of President Sheikh Mohamed has invested heavily in Pakistan’s polio eradication programme. That support will not waver. But stopping wild poliovirus alone will not deliver us. What about the children of Yemen’s northern governorates, where measles, polio and diphtheria outbreaks ravage an under-immunised and chronically malnourished population? Who will ensure vaccination of the children of Somalia, particularly those in the southern and central parts of the country, living through the world’s longest outbreak of circulating variant poliovirus? The answer, of course, is all of us. We must work together, under the vision of “Health for All by All”, to chart a pathway to protecting these children. Polio is not zero-sum. There is no way some of us can win if others lose. Either we all win, or we all lose. And right now, circumstances have never been better for a win – a win for our children, their children and all of the children who follow. This is the history we seek to make.