A thread about polio could be very interesting. It is extremely important that the global goal of eradicating polio is achieved. Whether that goal is achievable or not, I don't know. Let's hope so because a population without naturally acquired polio immunity is extremely vulnerable to a resurgence of the disease. (The same question has to be posed for measles BTW.)
www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/why-polio-just-became-a-global-health-crisis-and-a-global-governance-crisis/257761/
The resurgence of an old disease can be especially dangerous, as the world has learned before. In the 1950s and 1960s, the use of the insecticide DDT led to a reduction in the population of mosquitoes, which in turn decreased the number of deaths due to malaria. But the effects were temporary, and when the disease resurged, people had lost some of their natural immunity, and deaths spiked.
We've had similar warning signs with polio as well: the 2010 outbreak in the Congo, for example, had a 50 percent morbidity rate, WHO spokesperson Sona Bari told me, more than twice what is usually seen in unimmunized populations. "If we fail, we are not going to continue to have 50 kids paralysed each year, we're going to have hundreds of thousands," Aylward said.
www.nature.com/news/2011/110201/full/news.2011.63.html?s=news_rss
Complete eradication does not spell the end for polio. Once the wild virus is eliminated, the weakened living virus present in the oral vaccine will persist. These are called "vaccine derived polio viruses" or VDPVs, and in rare cases they have reverted back to virulence and caused outbreaks. Between 2005 and 2009, Nigeria witnessed 2922 cases of polio caused by VDPVs rather than the wild virus.
In the post-polio era, VDPVs will be the new target. Vaccinations would need to switch from the oral polio vaccine to the inactivated polio vaccine, which contains dead virus, according to Pallansch.
Sorry for the tangent - not too sure what polio has to do with the government's attitude to measles, vit A and MMR!