CNN – In 2020, a devastating virus officially disappeared from the continent it had once ravaged, a remarkable success in public health that followed after decades of work. But maybe you missed it.
The eradication of wild polio in Africa in August was hailed as a “big day” by the World Health Organization and celebrated by public health officials.
However, the overwhelming pandemic COVID-19 kept it from the front pages and ensured that it would deal an almost fatal blow to a deadly disease with little fanfare.
“It erased the massive retirement, publicity and recognition that this milestone deserves,” said Dr. Tunji Funsho, the person most responsible for eradicating wild polio from Nigeria and, with it, Africa. .
But the moment was “a great sigh of relief,” added Funsho, whose work as chairman of Rotary International’s polio eradication program in Nigeria earned him a place in the top 100 most influential people in Nigeria. Time of 2020.
“After seeing and arresting children paralyzed by the wild polio virus … this kind of vision has become history,” he told CNN, while the scale of the realization still faltered in his he sees as he speaks. “No child would ever be paralyzed by the wild polio virus in Nigeria again.”
The year of Funsho is called as 2020 in reverse; instead of seeing a disease spread indiscriminately and freeze the world in shock, it strangled the last embers of a different virus and unlocked large amounts of human potential.
But his is not the only achievement that has been lost in the midst of the dizzying 2020 expedition.
Even before COVID-19 existed, humans had an unmistakable, scientific tendency to believe that the world is poorer, angrier, and more restless than it really is; an unconscious desire to keep us in negative stereotypes and ignore the scale of progress that unfolds right in front of us.
Many experts believe it is a habit picked up in childhood and reinforced by media coverage and our psychological quirks. In short, we believe that the world is a bad place that is getting worse, a feeling that has certainly grown in the last twelve months.
The only problem? We are wrong.
“I am an optimist born,” Funsho said, reflecting on the challenges his effort has faced over the years: from a Boko Haram uprising that prevented children in northern Nigeria from being vaccinated against polio to landslides. traitors who forced his team to travel by motorbike, donkey and camel to shoot.
“When the world comes together with a common purpose: to improve the lives of all the citizens of the world, no matter where they live, we can achieve that,” he said. “I was very optimistic and I was right.”
Good things continued to happen in 2020, even as the loss and isolation spread to an epic scale.
And, according to several scientists and data experts, achievements like Funsho are constantly evolving in a rapidly improving world. We just aren’t paying attention.
“This is probably the best time”
“In a world with a lot of problems, it’s forbidden to talk about good things,” lamented Ola Rosling. Rosling is a co-author of the best-selling book, “Factfulness,” which aimed to educate people about undervalued improvements in global poverty, health, and well-being.
Rosling is one of the experts who forces people to think differently about our world. And in 2020, their efforts are especially intense.
“Even for years without a pandemic, people are reluctant to believe that the world is better than it was,” he told CNN. “We could make the world a lot better. There are a lot of problems,” he admitted. “But I think the main problem is our mindset.”
Changing that mindset has been the mission of Rosling and her late father, Hans. His 2018 book was acclaimed by Bill Gates, who paid any U.S. college graduate 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 rates, girls in education, boys vaccinated against measles, and dozens of other metrics, respondents systematically assumed that every measure was worse. of what it is.
In fact, if the authors had “placed a banana next to each of the three (options) and let some chimpanzees be able to choose the answers, they could be expected to get one of three correct questions, outperforming most of the humans in the process, “Hans Rosling wrote in 2015.
“There is no political or partisan division in this misconception,” Ola Rosling, who now heads the Gapminder organization, told CNN. “In a changing world, systematically, left and right, people are equally obsolete in the world.”
It seems that we do not want to ignore these negative assumptions. In a 2018 study cited by psychologists, including Canadian-American author Steven Pinker, as proof of people’s ignorance of global improvements, Harvard researchers asked participants to look for different things, such as blue dots. threatening faces or unethical actions.
“We found that when participants searched for a category that became less frequent over time, they“ expanded ”that category to include more stuff,” study lead author David Levari told CNN. “So when blue dots became weird, people called a wider range of blue colors. When threatening faces became weird, people called a wider range of threatening facial expressions.”
“These findings suggest that when people are alert to something negative that is becoming less common, instead of celebrating their good fortune, they may start to find the negative in more places than they used to do,” he said.
Obsolete assumptions are passed down through generations, taught during childhood, and reinforced with media coverage of negative but exceptional events, Rosling suggested.
And when things get really bad, like in 2020, the human tendency to take on the worst matters. “According to our worldview, any huge catastrophe immediately becomes the worst catastrophe in history,” Rosling said.
“The world is very bad, but it’s probably the best time,” he added. “And most people can’t imagine it because of how our brains are connected.”
Finding positive aspects in a difficult year
Negativity can be a human tendency, but experts say challenging it can help us place even a year as heavy as 2020 in its proper context.
The pandemic, for example, slowed efforts to resolve any scientific success. But it also covered a number of successes and assured us that we would spend much more time focusing on a new health crisis, rather than celebrating the fact that others are slowly coming to an end.
One of these milestones was achieved by a team of doctors, including virologist Ravindra Gupta, who cured HIV in one person only a second time; a success achieved in 2019 that became public knowledge in March.
“It was really huge news,” Gupta told CNN. “The first time it happened was almost ten years ago and people hadn’t been able to do it again, so people wondered if that was real or if it was a coincidence.”
“It reinforces the hope that HIV can be cured,” said Richard Jefferys, director of scientific projects for the U.S.-based Treatment Action Group.
The pandemic also sparked a historically rapid vaccine that rewrote all the rules about how quickly a shot could occur.
“I think it’s unique,” said David Matthews, a professor of virology at the University of Bristol, of the multiple vaccine candidates approaching or reaching approval in 2020. “It’s important to remember that earlier this year we had literally no idea if some kind of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was possible. “
“We are entering a new era of vaccine development,” added Andrew Preston of the University of Bath. There is even hope that the mRNA technology first used in some COVID-19 vaccines may work against a wide range of other infections, including cancer.
And the crisis also led to a renewed appreciation of scientific work, according to Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “For the first time I remember, people listen to scientists directly on a regular basis. And I think people like what they hear, [about] how we think through a problem, how we make assessments, how we react to different situations, ”he told CNN.
“I think this is a really important and positive development, and one on which we need to build.”
Progress is making progress: as wild polio suffocated in Africa, Funsho told CNN that his team quickly reorganized its operation to fight COVID-19 in the region, protecting it from the virus. ‘a way that would otherwise be impossible.
And the crisis may have had even deeper implications elsewhere. “This pandemic helped us see all the real actors of what we call society: all these uniformed people, who were always talked about badly,” Rosling said.
“I think it sharpens our seriousness about what a society really is and the kind of solidarity we need to keep it going.”
Meanwhile, Rosling wants to highlight the constant but vital improvements that have taken place in the background.
“The trends that really shape and shape the lives of the future generation are things that never show up in the news,” he said. He cited increased access to electricity, decreased mortality in childbirth and progress against diseases such as malaria and polio as sources of light that shone throughout the year.
“To realize how good the world is and how many things get better, you first have to face people’s worldview and show them that in reality, no, you’re very wrong,” he summed up.
“Being aware of progress makes you realize that the problems you hear tonight, feel because we will try to fix them.”
“The problems are to be solved,” Rosling concluded. “And we’ve managed to solve the biggest problems historically.”
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