Polio eradication impossible without universal effort

Polio has killed and crippled millions of innocent children for centuries. Due to repeated vaccination efforts there has not been a case of polio in the Western Hemishpere for nearly a decade.
In 1990 the world agreed to fund a campaign to eradicate polio by the year 2000 just as smallpox had been eradicated two decades earlier. Lack of funding, wars and other priorities prevented humankind from eliminating this destructive virus on this reasonable time table.
Eradication was missed again in 2003 as rumors swept across northern Nigeria that the house to house vaccination campaign was part of a covert effort to sterilize Muslim girls. One could speculate that the US invasion plans for Iraq had some influence on propagation of this rumor.
This vaccination interruption made Nigeria the only country in Africa to have never eradicated polio. It led to large outbreaks of polio that not only crippled thousands of Nigerian children but also spread to other African nations and beyond. According to USAID polio eventually returned to 20 countries that were previously polio free.
In 2005 vaccination efforts resumed but suffered from inertia and lack of funding and training. Castigated by other Islamic nations for its polio immunization failures Nigeria revitalized is program in 2008. From late 2009 through April 2010 there were only two confirmed cases compared to 388 in the same period a year earlier.
If just one community in Nigeria, or any other nation in the world refuses to join in the polio eradication campaign, every nation in the world must maintain a polio immunization program. Perhaps as bad, the longer we postpone the eradication of this virus the greater chance that evolution will have its way with this virus and a new strain will emerge that will require an entirely new global eradication effort assuming the new strain will be as vulnerable to our new vaccines.