A week ago, I happened to watch three different television programs in the US on the same day. Although seemingly unrelated they were linked in a profoundly troubling way.
The first was an interview with the eminent American author Philip Roth, who has a new book out, Nemesis. The second was the lush opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. The third was the investigative journalism program, 60 Minutes, one segment of which was devoted to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s richest charity. Linking these three with metal braces and leather straps was one word – polio.
Roth’s novel evokes the terror of the polio epidemic that swept the writer’s hometown of Newark in the 1940s. People did not know that polio was spread through human faecal matter. Terrified that flies were spreading it, whole households hunted down a single fly before it could infect a sleeping child. As inescapable as the paranoia was, the poignant irony was that the US president of the time was the world’s most famous polio victim, Franklin D Roosevelt.
Polio is now a distant nightmare in the west. But in four remaining polio-endemic countries – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria – it continues to maim and kill.
Three of these – India, Pakistan and Nigeria – were proudly present at the Commonwealth parade. Nothing can be more antithetical to an event that celebrates the power and grace of the human body than a disease that cripples children.
The Gates Foundation and Rotary International have together put in more than a billion dollars to ensure that every single child worldwide tastes the life-saving vaccine.
60 Minutes travelled with Melinda Gates to a polio ward in Delhi, full of children lying in hospital beds. The camera then zoomed into a slum where a boy calmly filled a jug of water from a tap under which ran an open gutter bobbing with faeces.
Bad plumbing facilitates the spread of the polio virus but sadly the issue gets an airing only when westerners are involved, as in the recent case of toiletgate and the Games.
Hearteningly, India’s war against polio is a few drops from being won. The virus is now limited to only two states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Last year there were 741 cases. This year, after the government introduced a new bivalent vaccine, there have been only 39 cases compared to 395 this time last year.
Hobbling this last and critical stage of the polio war is a huge shortfall in funding. Where will the money come from to support the 2 million-strong immunisation army of health workers? The international community have done outstanding work. Perhaps it’s now time for Indians to pick up the tab.
How embarrassing that a medieval disease such as polio should be the white man’s burden in a country that wants to be a superpower and has the fourth and fifth richest men in the world, Mukesh Ambani and Laxmi Mittal, for citizens? The same affluent, Facebook India that shudders at the filthy toilets and corruption plaguing the Commonwealth Games could eradicate polio if it chooses to. When prevention is so achingly simple – four doses of the oral vaccine – and the potential resources so plentiful, it is immoral to allow the virus a safe future.
The US government didn’t defeat polio. It was defeated through science and a volunteer movement called the March of Dimes started by FDR, calling on every American to contribute a dime toward the fight. To galvanise the drive, writes Roth, was a blizzard of posters, “a pretty little girl wearing leg braces … a clean-cut little boy with leg braces”. Amazingly, it was this deluge of dimes that funded the research that led to Jonas Salk’s lifesaving polio vaccine and later Dr Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine.
India needs its own Rally of Rupees. The Pulse Polio campaigns endorsed by Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan would be far more effective if they not only called on the poor to get their babies to open their mouths but on the rich to open their wallets.
If the educated middle class is uninvolved it is because there is no palpable fear of a “pretty little girl” or “clean-cut little boy” being infected.
But as long as polio threatens even one child in any part of the world, children everywhere remain at risk because the highly contagious virus travels without a passport. In 2003 there was a polio case in Lebanon and genetic sequencing traced it to India.
Devastated by a disease that paralyses children, Roth’s protagonist asks in despair: “Doesn’t God have a conscience?” It’s a question we Indians could well ask of ourselves.
The Guardian