Maryn McKenna - July 13, 2011

A number of years ago, I was in New Delhi, at the end of an exhausting 18 hours in which I had torn around the city to watch a National Immunization Day. On those days — like a national holiday, with flags and banners and kids let out from school — tens of millions of children line up to stick out their tongues and receive the sugary drops that contain the vaccine that should protect them against polio.

The Indian government, along with the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the volunteer ground troops of Rotary International, has been organizing these days now for most of two decades, always coming closer to the goal of eradicating polio, never quite getting there. On this day, which occurred close to the end of weeks I had spent embedded with a WHO “STOP Polio” team, 135 million children were expected to queue in cities and suburbs and rich neighborhoods and slums. I spent the day with the team I had been observing, racing in a battered turquoise Tata from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to understand where the campaign’s message was working and where its earnest persuasions had failed.

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