Polio vaccine A global effort to eradicate polio, led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and The Rotary Foundation, began in 1988 and has relied largely on the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin and Mikhail Chumakov (Sabin-Chumakov vaccine). Polio was eliminated in the Americas by 1994. The disease was officially eliminated in 36 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia, in 2000. Europe was declared polio-free in 2002. Since January 2011, no cases of the disease have been reported in India, hence in February 2012, the country was taken off the WHO list of polio-endemic countries. In March 2014, India
Sabin Vaccine Institute Africa, and the Americas. Sabin is currently working on multiple vaccines for humans including vaccines for Hookworm infection ("Na"-GST-1, "Na"-APR-1), Schistosomiasis ("Sm"-TSP-2), Chagas disease ("Tc"24, TSA-1), Leishmaniasis ("Ld"-NH36, PdSP15), Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)/Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (Pan-β-CoVax), Soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH), and Onchocerciasis (Ov-"103", Ov-"RAL-2"). In 2006, Sabin co-founded the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases in order "to raise the awareness, political will and funding necessary to control and eliminate the most common NTDs." Through its work on NTDs, Sabin hopes to reduce poverty caused by these diseases as many of them have been shown to adversely affect