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| Nuru Ziblim, a Guinea worm health volunteer in Ghana, educates children on how to use pipe filters to avoid the parasite when they go to the fields with their families. Credit: The Carter Center |
This was originally published on Global Health TV on January 14, 2016.
Only once in history has a human disease has been eliminated
from the face of the earth. That was smallpox, eradicated in 1980.
We won’t eradicate
either disease this year. Eradication requires that several years pass with no new
cases being detected. But it does look like 2016 is the year we could eliminate both diseases.
To be sure, we have been close before with polio, and then
lost ground. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that “failure to stop
polio in these last remaining areas could result in as many as 200,000 new
cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world.” So there is little room
for error.
