Michael Galway at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
Thousands of health workers around the world hunt for polio in two ways: By looking for signs of acute flaccid paralysis in children and testing the environment for the presence of the virus. In Pakistan, for the first time ever, both sets of data look promising: There hasn’t been a single child paralyzed by wild poliovirus in more than a year or any virus detected in the environment in more than two months.
This morning, I accompanied Bill Gates to Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Center in Islamabad because he wanted to see the progress for himself. We got to listen in as the team leading Pakistan’s program pored over a huge trove of data and debated what it was telling them about how to reach more children in the next house-to-house vaccination campaign, which starts a week from now.
More here.