According to the World Health Organisation, only three countries in the world (Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan) remain polio-endemic. This figure represents a drastic reduction in the number of countries where children still suffer from this dreaded childhood disease, down from a high of 125 countries in 1988.

In other words, even the world's poorest countries, such as Burundi, Eritrea, Niger, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, have all eliminated polio. War-torn countries, such as Somalia (which has not had an effective central government for over 20 years) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (which has suffered perhaps the bloodiest civil war in recent history), and even basket cases such as Zimbabwe (which once boasted the world's highest rate of hyperinflation) - in short, all those countries that rank among the most wretched and dysfunctional addresses in the world, have performed better than Nigeria in polio eradication!

The tragedy of polio is that while it can and has been easily eliminated in most countries, it still poses a threat to every child in the world due to the failure of these three errant countries to eradicate it. According to most global health experts, failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in as many as 200,000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world.

Poliomyelitis affects children under five years, leading to irreversible paralysis and sometimes death when the child's breathing muscles become immobilised.

Public health officials in Nigeria have blamed the disease's endemicity in the West African country on the failure of vaccination efforts in the northern part of the country, where religious and community leaders have often resisted vaccination as a Western-backed plot to sterilise their women. In the recent past, vaccination teams have been attacked and, in some cases, killed in northern Nigeria.

Source: WHO Fact Sheet No. 114, April 2013. Available at www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs114/en/