Polio vaccination has a positive impact

Sixty years after the Polio Vaccination Campaign started—August 26, 1962—Cuban families and authorities have good reasons to remain forever proud and grateful for the results of a program that came to stay, much like so many other measures taken by the Revolution in the field of health.

It is not because a long time has passed that the before and after, so different in this history, are erased. Until January 1, 1959, this ailment was an endemic disease that killed or paralyzed and tampered with the muscle development of some 300 Cuban children, as relief or recovery treatments were not available to those who needed them.

Therefore, the decision to launch a large-scale, well though-out anti-polio program became a milestone and one of the first acid tests of the revolutionary health care organization, still unable to produce its own immunizers. However, someone did dream of them, and big.

On that day of 1962, the Cubans still had no precise idea of the scope of that program, undertaken along with many others that the Revolution designed as part of its efforts to change things, such as the Literacy Campaign of 1961 or the Education Reform, all of which owe their success to full popular support. Nevertheless, its importance soon became noticeable. And it never stopped, to the point that in 1995 Cuba proudly declared itself an internationally recognized polio-free country.

Some 100,000 members of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) participated, together with the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), in this vaccination campaign for children between the ages of one month and 14. Thanks to the political will and the coordinated effort of mass and sectorial organizations, 2,216,022 children were immunized.

The former Soviet Union offered the vaccines, whereas Czechoslovakia provided technical assistance, and Cuba engaged its top scientific centers and specialists in this huge task that paved the way for the beginning of virological research in the country.

Today, the victory over the terrible scourge is not water under the bridge, but another step toward the development of Cuban technological and professional expertise, made possible thanks to the initiative and leadership of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro.

A look at Cuban history reveals the inception of the disease in the country in the late 19th century. From 1932 to 1962, according to estimates, 413,000 people became infected and 430 died as a result of five major epidemics in 1934, 1942, 1946, 1952 and 1955.

Humanity has suffered from this scourge for some 3,000 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that one out of every 200 infections causes irreversible paralysis, mostly in the lower limbs, whereas 5%-10% of those afflicted die from lack of respiratory muscle function.

All the more reason to appreciate Cuba’s feat in 1995, in times of very serious difficulties that followed the collapse of the socialist countries and led the Empire to beef up its aggressive Cuba policy in the vain hope of giving us the final blow.

Cuba received the Certification for the Eradication of Poliomyelitis from the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), which highlighted the combination of scientific-technological resources, the State’s political will, the Cuban people’s engagement, our social and ethical model of development, and international solidarity and technical cooperation.

Thus were the origins of the First National Vaccination Conference, the conception, ideology, instruments and methodology of which shook the world.