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Why not just settle for the huge drop in polio cases that we’ve seen over the past decade and then spend money on other things that kill so many more kids, like diarrhea and malnutrition?

“Polio is special,” Gates tells NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. “Once you get it done, you save $2 billion a year that will be applied to those other activities. There’s no better deal economically to getting to zero.”

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Photo by Stephen Bailey

ANIRUDRA has spent 30 years trying not to make Nepal’s children cry – often failing.

He has carried out vaccinations on the country’s ‘Babus’ and ‘Nanus’ around 240,000 times. He tries to soothe the children by distracting them with a clicking tongue and a few soothing words as the needle goes in.

The 53-year-old has made his own significant contribution to making the country Polio free and is still going strong.

Anirudra Kayastha, from Bhaktapur near Kathmandu, grew into the job helping his father. He went with him on the smallpox vaccination programme to then very isolated areas in Kavre and Sindhupalchok. He then started work himself aged 23 with the Expanded Programme on Immunization, which was set up by the World Health Organisation.

He had the hard job of walking door-to-door in the villages around the Kathmandu Valley. Anirudra had to persuade sometimes reluctant parents to let this stranger stick his strange medicine into their children.

“It was very difficult to convince people and I had to do a certain number each day,” he said.

The injections and oral doses were for Polio, DPT (Diptheria, Whooping Cough and Tetanus), Tetanus, Measles and BCG (Tuberculosis). Over the years, he worked for various Government family planning clinics and health facilities, mostly in the Kathmandu Valley area.

For the last 20 years he has worked at Siddhi Memorial Foundation, which runs a non-profit hospital for women and children in his home town. The vaccinations are done free of charge through the Government of Nepal’s National Immunization Programme.

“I am satisfied with the job I have had. I feel I have done good work,” said Anirudra, a father of three. “In the past, people gave birth to so many children but only one or two survived. Children died of tetanus within 72 hours. We had cases of Polio. I don’t see these things anymore. I have made a good contribution to that.”

Thanks to the hard work of people like Anirudra the incidence of all the diseases he vaccinated against has drastically reduced. Nepal had its last Polio case in 2010. The World Health Organisation will declare the country polio-free only after all its neighbours in South East Asia have also been Polio free for three years.

So Anirudra is still at work at Siddhi Memorial Hospital. During the early years he administered around 4,500 injections and oral doses a year, which has now risen to more than 20,000 a year. It’s impossible to say for sure how many he has done. But a rough average of 12,000 a year for 20 years would be around 240,000 injections.

He now also vaccinates for Japanese Encephalitis (JE), Hepatitis and MMR as the country tries to further expand its coverage.

“Preventing infections is very important,” he said. “I am experienced in holding the baby and making the injection so the child feels little pain and it reduces the risk of infection.”

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