Efforts, including the decisive ones by the Bill & Belinda Gates Foundation, to eradicate polio worldwide are showing incredible results: the total number of cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to just 33 in 2018. It was endemic in 125 countries in 1988 and in 2018 it survives in only two: Afghanistan and Pakistan, mainly due to the difficulty of accessing rural areas caused by violence and instability.
