Polio's Precarious Future A Review of Polio: The Odyssey of Eradication and an Interview with Dr. T. Jacob John

The time has come to reexamine the modern polio era. in Polio: The Odyssey of Eradication, recently published by Hurst and distributed by Oxford University Press, science journalist Thomas Abraham does just that, first narrating polio's historical and virologic backstory, and then interrogating its still-elusive eradication. Along the way, the author weaves actors from past and present researchers, to global health leaders fueled by ego and dreams, to passionate, committed Rotarians and local stakeholders. All the while, Abraham pledges first and foremost to represent "the needs and aspirations of those in developing countries" and explicate "the messy reality that lies underneath an ambitious global health campaign, a reality the public rarely sees." By quoting a rural Nigerian farmer from Kano Province who poignantly asks: "Why do you keep coming again and again to give polio vaccine? Why this polio, polio?" the author echoes the question of millions who cannot quite fathom why a seemingly rare disease commands such an inordinate investment of time, effort, and money, while children in low-income countries still dieâ€"day-in, day-outâ€"of measles, malaria, and other deadly, ubiquitous blights. in the closing chapters of Polio: The Odyssey of Eradication, Abraham moves to recent geopolitical events: disinformation around polio vaccine, violence unleashed on polio vaccinators, and the bitter fruit of using vaccine-related subterfuge to locate Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But by this point many readers will have concluded that the stage was already set for a lingering (and possibly unwinnable) war against polio thanks to assorted missteps and the world's tortoise-like response to OPVs sporadic mutation to a neurovirulent pathogen. All of these factors have handicapped polio's final purge.