Africa Is Certified Free of Wild Polio

In August 2020, the independent Africa Regional Certification Commission declared the World Health Organization's African Region, made up of 47 countries, free of wild poliovirus after four years without a case. The announcement represented a major public health milestone, reached through decades of coordinated international immunization and disease monitoring. The decision followed a decades-long process of documenting polio surveillance, immunization, and laboratory capacity across the region, including field verification visits to each country.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, launched in 1988 after Rotary International began a worldwide polio immunization effort in 1985, grew into a public-private partnership of national governments, the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The campaign sought to repeat the success achieved with smallpox, which remains the only human infectious disease completely eradicated in history. Because polioviruses require human hosts to survive and reproduce, public health planners recognized that maintaining high levels of community immunity could interrupt transmission cycles until the pathogen died out.