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The World Health Organization (WHO) announced its $5.5 billion plan to completely eradicate polio, a viral disease that can lead to partial or full paralysis. Just last year, there were only a little over 200 reported cases of polio worldwide, which occurred in northern Nigeria and the Afghan-Pakistan border area. The strong decline in polio is a very good sign that polio can actually be eliminated. The WHO's plan is to phase out the current campaigns for polio vaccinations and secure the vaccine for emergency use in the future if the disease strikes again.

"We've never been so close to eradication as we are now," the director of Global Polio Eradication at WHO, Hamid Jafari stated. If polio can successfully be eliminated, it will be the second disease after smallpox to ever be erased by medical science.

The new plan, known as the Global Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan, has the goal of decreasing the amount of wild cases of polio, which are cases that occur through normal transmission as opposed to vaccine-related ones, to zero by 2015. By 2018, the plan is to completely eradicate the virus. Within the next few years, there will be a transition from the oral vaccine to an injected one using the dead virus as opposed to the live one. The people behind this plan believe that the key factor is global funding and cooperation.

WHO, UNICEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been the top three contributors in resources for this cause. With the help of several other foundations, polio has been contained and erased slowly from global community. The plan will have to focus on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria where it appears that wild cases of polio are currently concentrated in. As early as February of this year, there were nine cases of polio affected women workers in Kano located in northern Nigeria.

Before vaccinations and treatments, polio afflicted nearly 300,000 people per year. After hard work and long efforts, the number dropped to 650 in 2011 and 223 in 2012. Hopefully in a few years, that number will sit and remain at zero.