Morning Briefing

In this Atlantic opinion piece, Rachel Hills, a freelance writer based in London, examines the WHO's decision on May 25 to declare polio a public health emergency, "calling for the 194 member states to fully fund the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and fill the currently $945 million gap in its budget for 2012-13." She writes, "Few people probably associate the phrase 'global health emergency' with polio, a disease that has been around for 5,000 years and is on a decades-long decline so steep that there are less than a thousand recorded cases left on Earth," but "polio's threat is still very real, and the mission to finally stamp it out forever is a crucial one for reasons even bigger than the disease itself."