By Nadia Ramoutar                                    Ireland                                 19.08.2026

Before becoming the Communications Coordinator for the MMM, I worked in The Mission to End Leprosy (TMTEL) and learned so much about infectious diseases and it was an education for me to learn the role that injustice and poverty play in these challenges. There is a cure for Leprosy that was found in the 1980s in Trinity College in Ireland. It’s a simple fix that requires inexpensive and minor care. But the tiny pockets where it still exists are amongst the poorest of the poor in our world.

A cure for polio and a vaccine for preventing polio also exists. It was thought, ten years ago, that polio was going to be eradicating soon.  But that didn’t happen even though the medical innovation and funding existed at the time to see it happen.  In 2016, Nigeria eradicated the wild polio virus leaving the WHO efforts to think that the end of the virus was just years away.  But humans have a way of creating obstacles to progress in medical issues.  Tragically, two areas of our world exist where children are still needlessly infected with polio: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Recently, a comprehensive article on this appeared in “Nature”, a portfolio of stories about advancements in Science explaining how eradication targets had “come and gone: 2019, 2023 and 2025.”  Experts in health economics explain that while eradication on paper is possible, in practice it is not.

In the last 40 years, incredible progress has been made in polio vaccine and treatment and the numbers of people have plummeted but why do the cases remain active in Pakistan and Afghanistan?  There are several factors at play here, but the cases keep reemerging in the poorest of poor areas where vaccine workers are facing tremendous obstacles.  Areas are impacted by violent outbreaks which is making things very challenging.  There have been violent attacks on workers and there is a huge threat to their lives.  Police who are accompanying health care workers have been killed.

Also, there are issues with major health funding cuts as politics in the USA has led to vast and unexpected shortages in areas that were well funded before.  The politics of the areas infected also mean that getting access to educate women about the benefits of immunization are limited.  There are practical issues that force the health care workers to have to innovate and find ways to work against the limitations and blockages.  What a tragedy that they are prevented from bringing this historic infectious disease to an end!

We know that good people work very hard to bring about change for the poorest of the poor and yet their efforts are not enough.  We know that policies are made that are hard to implement because there are challenges in negotiating in politically unstable areas of the world.

When we think about the cost of violence and instability it seems like a tremendous burden that children should suffer because of it.