This is the VOA Special English Development Report.

Ending polio before the end of this year remains a goal of sixcountries where the disease is still present. New cases are mostlyin Nigeria, India and Pakistan, but also in Afghanistan, Egypt andNiger.

Health ministers of these six nations held an emergency meetingthis month with the World Health Organization in Geneva,Switzerland. They presented a new plan to vaccinatetwo-hundred-fifty million children.

The campaign to end polio began in nineteen-eighty-eight. At thattime, about three-hundred-fifty-thousand cases were reported eachyear. New cases were down to fewer than six-hundred-eighty lastyear. Three-hundred of those people were in Nigeria.

There have been problems with vaccination campaigns in northernNigeria. Last year, Muslim clergy in the state of Kano refused tolet children get the vaccine. They said the medicine caused AIDS,cancer and a loss of reproductive ability in females. The W-H-Odenied these claims. Nigerian doctors said their own tests showedthat the vaccine is safe.

But, because of the situation in the north, polio was able tospread to Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Togo. Thesecountries had been free of the virus.

Polio spreads quickly throughcontact with human waste. The virus enters the body through themouth. Victims, mostly children, can lose the ability to move theirarms or legs. Breathing may also be difficult. Some victims die.There is no cure for polio.

Bruce Aylward is an official of the W-H-O campaign to end polio.He says this is the best and possibly the last chance for the worldto become polio-free. Money is a problem. Many countries that arefree of polio have stopped vaccinating children.

The campaign to end polio has involved more than two-hundredcountries. About two-thousand million children have been vaccinated.International investment in the program has totaled more thanthree-thousand-million dollars over the past fifteen years.

The W-H-O says an additional one-hundred-fifty-million dollars isurgently needed for the final effort. If the campaign succeeds,polio would become the second disease in history to be ended by amedical campaign. The first was smallpox.

This VOA Special English Development Report was written by JillMoss.