POLIO paralysed 1000 children a day in 1988. Last year, thanks to the World Health Organization’s eradication effort, the world had just 2000 cases.
Getting to this point has cost more than $5 billion, and the WHO predicts that completely halting the spread of the virus will cost another $1.5 billion. Some public health experts complain that this is too much to spend on a now-rare disease, and that the WHO should switch to merely containing the virus, but this week a US-based team of public health modellers show in The Lancet (DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60532-7) that this would be even more costly.…
