“Eradicating polio is like wrestling with a gorilla.  Even when you have it down, you cannot let go.”

At a special event in Karachi, Pakistan, recently, global and national experts concurred that ending polio in Pakistan, and the world, is within reach.  “Eradicating polio is like wrestling with a gorilla. Even when you have the gorilla down you cannot let go. Now we have so few polio cases, but if we let go it is again going to become a problem that is going to haunt us forever,” said Chris Maher, senior specialist in polio eradication and former chief scientist of the global polio programme at WHO.  “Surveillance systems in Pakistan are orders of magnitude above the sensitivity of anything we had in the early part of eradication. For the first eight years that I was working on polio, we did not know what it was. We didn’t have genetic sequencing. The sophistication of what exists now is remarkable, and it also affects our perception of what is going on, because, in the past, we did not have these tools. So, we were not finding as much virus as we are now.”