The World Health Organization’s African Region was declared free from wild polio in August following decades of work by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, governments and partners. The announcement came as the virus was finally eliminated in Nigeria. The Africa Regional Certification Commission, a task group appointed by the WHO to eradicate the disease, certified the continent free of wild polio in the summer, four years after the last recorded case.

Polio typically affects children under five and can lead to paralysis and sometimes even death. There is no cure, but the polio vaccine offers lifelong immunisation. In 1996, an estimated 75,000 children in Africa were paralysed by wild polio, prompting a vaccination programme launched by Nelson Mandela. The virus, however, clung on in Nigeria, which less than a decade ago accounted for around half of all global polio deaths. Speaking in 2020, the director general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the eradication of wild polio in Africa as a “public health triumph”.

Image: child in Abuja, Nigeria, by Muhammadtaha Ibrahim Ma’aji