Nature  
Volume 485 Number 7400 pp547-672  31 May 2012
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html

Editorial
A war not yet won
Nature 485, 547–548 (31 May 2012)
doi:10.1038/485547b
Published online
30 May 2012
The eradication of polio is within reach, but it is too early for self-congratulation.

Extract
Just 25 years ago, some 350,000 people contracted polio every year. So far this year, just 60 cases have been reported across four countries worldwide. No wonder, then, that some can foresee world leaders slapping one another on the back for ending polio’s scourge on humanity in a few years’ time, much as their predecessors did in 1980 when the world was declared smallpox-free.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative started in 1988 to target poliomyelitis, a paralysing viral disease that mostly affects children. Some US$9 billion later, the result is the lowest number of cases ever tallied, as well as the fewest countries affected.

But it is too early for self-congratulation and complacency. The polio-eradication campaign faces a US$1-billion budget shortfall over the next two years that threatens to erase this year’s hard-won successes. Despite a long history of mismanagement and missed deadlines (goals of ending viral spread by 2000 and 2005 passed the programme by, and the same is likely to be true of 2012), the world has come too close to vanquishing this ancient disease to fail to see the task through…