Polio may be eradicated within 12 months, the World Health Organization announced Monday. The virus is still considered endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but Michel Zaffran, the WHO’s director of polio eradication, said in a statement: “We think we could reach the point where we have truly interrupted the transmission at the end of the year or the end of the low season [winter] next year.” Polio would be the second human-hosted virus to be eradicated since smallpox was wiped out in 1980.
