White Paper: Elimination and Eradication of Disease

Elimination and eradication (E&E) are the most ambitious public health goals for a program to achieve.

In fact, historically, the world has seen many failures in the attempt to eliminate and eradicate diseases. Individual, disease-specific elimination goals have been achieved in some regions (e.g. wild polio in the Americas in 1994 and South-East Asia a full 20 years later and then in Africa in 2020) but there is only one successful human disease eradication program: the Global Smallpox Eradication Program.

The World Health Organization’s new 2030 NTD Roadmap titled ‘Ending the Neglect to Attain the Sustainable Development Goals’ which was launched in 2021, targets twelve diverse diseases for elimination or eradication in the years and decades ahead.(1) Traditionally, E&E programs are implemented as extremely vertical programs. Some argue that this verticality is essential to the success of the program and a laser-like focus is required to achieve the goal.