CNN – In 2020, a devastating virus officially disappeared from the continent it had once ravaged – a remarkable public health achievement that followed decades of work. But you may have missed it.
The eradication of wild polio in Africa in August was hailed by the World Health Organization as a “big day” and celebrated by public health officials.
Still, the presumptuous COVID-19 pandemic kept it off the front pages and left a near-fatal blow to a deadly disease with little fanfare.
“It stunned the huge cheer and publicity, and the recognition such a milestone deserves,” said Dr. Tunji Funsho, the person more than anyone else responsible for the eradication of wild polio in Nigeria, including Africa.
But the moment was “a huge sigh of relief,” added Funsho, whose work as chair of Rotary International’s polio eradication program in Nigeria landed him a spot on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
“I’ve seen and held children paralyzed by the wild polio virus … that kind of sight is a thing of the past,” he told CNN, while the magnitude of the feat still wavered in his voice as he spoke. “No child would ever again be paralyzed by the wild polio virus in Nigeria.”
The year of Funsho reads like 2020 in reverse order; instead of watching a disease spread indiscriminately and freeze the world in shock, he strangled the last embers of another virus and unlocked vast amounts of human potential.
But he’s not the only achievement lost in the dizzying 2020 expedition.
Even before COVID-19 existed, people had an undeniable and scientifically established tendency to believe that the world is poorer, more angry, and more restless than it really is; an unconscious desire to hold on to negative stereotypes and ignore the scale of progress unfolding right before us.
It’s a childhood habit that is reinforced by media coverage and our own psychological idiosyncrasies, many experts believe. Simply put, we think the world is a bad place that’s getting worse – a feeling that has no doubt grown over the past 12 months.
The only problem? Were wrong.
“I am a born optimist,” Funsho said, reflecting on the challenges his years of effort faced: from a Boko Haram uprising that prevented children in Northern Nigeria from being vaccinated against polio, to treacherous terrain that forced his team to travel. by motorcycle, donkey and camel to deliver shots.
“When the world comes together for one common goal – to improve the lives of every citizen in the world, no matter where they live – we can succeed,” he said. “I was quite optimistic and I was right.”
Good things continued to happen in 2020 even as loss and isolation spread on an epic scale.
And, according to dozens of scientists and data experts, achievements like Funsho’s are constantly being rolled out in a rapidly improving world. We just don’t pay attention.
‘These are probably the best of times’
“In a world with many problems, you shouldn’t really talk about good things,” wailed Ola Rosling. Rosling is co-author of a bestseller, “Factfulness,” which sought to educate people about underappreciated improvements in poverty, health and well-being in the world.
Rosling is one of many experts who are forcing people to think differently about our world. And in 2020 their efforts are particularly poignant.
“Even in years without a pandemic, people are very reluctant to believe the world is better than it used to be,” he told CNN. “We could make the world a lot better. There are a lot of problems,” he admitted. “But I think the biggest problem is our mindset.”
Changing that mindset is the mission of Rosling and his late father, Hans. Their 2018 book was praised by Bill Gates, who paid for every American college student to buy it for free. And it revealed an alarming human tendency; When the authors asked thousands of people around the world to estimate extreme poverty, girls in education, children vaccinated against measles, and dozens of other statistics, respondents systematically assumed that every measure was worse than him is.
In fact, if the authors had “ placed a banana next to each of the three (options) and let some chimpanzees pick the answers, they could be expected to get one in three questions right, with most people in beat the trial, ”Hans Rosling wrote in 2015.
“There is no partisan or political rift in this misconception,” Ola Rosling, who now heads the Gapminder organization, told CNN. “In a changing world, both left and right are systematically people equally old-fashioned about the world.”
It seems we don’t want to let go of those negative assumptions. In a 2018 study cited by psychologists, including Canadian-American author Steven Pinker, as evidence of people’s ignorance of global improvements, Harvard researchers asked participants to look for various things, such as blue dots, threatening faces. or unethical actions.
“We found that when participants looked for a category that became less common over time, they ‘expanded’ that category to include more things,” the study’s lead author, David Levari, told CNN. “So when blue dots became rare, people called a wider range of colors blue. When threatening faces became rare, people called a wider range of facial expressions threatening.”
“These findings suggest that when people are alert for something negative that is less common, instead of celebrating their happiness, they can discover that negative thing in more places than they used to,” he said.
Outdated assumptions are passed down from generation to generation, taught during childhood, and reinforced by media coverage of negative but extraordinary events, Rosling suggested.
And when things get really bad, like in 2020, the human tendency to take on the worst of things. “In our worldview, any major disaster immediately becomes the worst disaster ever,” said Rosling.
“The world is really bad, but these are probably the best of times,” he added. “And most people can’t imagine that because of the wiring of our brains.”
Finding positives in a difficult year
Negativity may be a human tendency, but experts say challenging it can help us put even a year as cumbersome as 2020 in context.
The pandemic, for example, put attempts to solve some scientific achievements to a halt. But it also covered a range of achievements – and caused us to spend a lot more time focusing on a new health crisis, rather than celebrating the fact that others are slowly but surely coming to an end.
Such a milestone was reached by a team of doctors, including virologist Ravindra Gupta, who cured HIV in a person for the second time ever; a 2019 achievement that became publicly known in March.
“It was really huge news,” Gupta told CNN. “The first time it happened was almost 10 years ago, and people couldn’t have done it again, so people wondered if this was real or if it was a fluke.”
“It strengthens the hope that a cure for HIV is possible,” said Richard Jefferys, science project director at the US-based Treatment Action Group.
The pandemic also led to a historically fast vaccine that rewrote all the rules about how quickly such an injection could be produced.
“I think it’s unique,” said David Matthews, Professor of Virology at the University of Bristol, of the multiple vaccine candidates that are near or approved in 2020. “It’s important to remember that at the beginning of the year we had literally no idea if a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was possible.”
“We are entering a new era of vaccine development,” added Andrew Preston of the University of Bath. In fact, there is hope that the mRNA technology first used in some COVID-19 vaccines could work against a host of other infections, including cancer.
And the crisis also spawned a renewed appreciation of scientific work, said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “For the first time I can remember, people regularly hear directly from scientists. And I think people like what they hear, [about] how we think about a problem, how we make estimates, how we respond to different situations, ”he told CNN.
“I think that’s a very important and positive development that we need to build on.”
Progress Brings Progress: While wild polio was being suppressed in Africa, Funsho told CNN his team would quickly repurpose their operation to tackle COVID-19 in the region and protect it from the virus in a way that would otherwise be impossible been.
And the crisis may have had even deeper consequences elsewhere. “This pandemic has helped us to see all the actual actors of what we call society – all these people in uniform, which was always talked badly about,” Rosling said.
“I think it heightens our seriousness about what a society really is and the kind of solidarity it takes to keep it going.”
In the meantime, Rosling wants to highlight the steady but essential improvements that have been made in the background.
“The trends that really shape and shape the lives of the future generation are things that never make the news,” he said. He cited increasing access to electricity, the decline in childbirth mortality and advances against diseases such as malaria and polio as sources of light that shone year round.
“To realize how good the world is and how many things are improving, you first have to face people’s worldview and show that you actually, no, you are often wrong,” he summarized.
“When you are aware of the progress, you realize that the problems you hear about tonight, you hear because we are going to try to solve them.”
“Problems have to be solved,” Rosling concluded. “And we have managed to solve the biggest problems historically.”
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