A Rotary engine

Jan 21st 2012 | new york | from the print edition of The Economist.

Goodbye to all that

IT IS a year since the last case of polio was diagnosed in India. That is not enough to pronounce the country polio-free—three clear years are the conventional period required for that to happen. But it is a good start. And if India really is clear, then what was once a global scourge will now be endemic to a mere three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. The number of people infected, meanwhile, has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 650 last year.

All this is in large part thanks to the efforts of Rotary International. In 1985, after a successful pilot study in the Philippines, this businessmen’s club cum global charity announced a plan to eradicate polio by vaccinating every child under five at risk of catching it. The estimate then was that it would cost $120m. Some $800m of Rotary money later (plus a lot from other sources), the virus is still out there, but its remaining hidey-holes tell their own story: where civil disorder is rife, medicine is hard.

On January 17th Rotary announced it had raised yet another $200m. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will contribute a further $405m, and the pressure will thus be kept up. John Germ, one of Rotary’s trustees, thinks that if all goes well 2016 might be the first year when no new cases are reported. That would, though, mean spending more than $1 billion a year between now and then.