Maybe because I spent so much time in hospitals, I was fascinated by disease as a kid. In fact, if I had known the word for “epidemiology” when I was attending university open days in high school, it’s entirely possible I would have ended up studying medical science (or medical sociology?) instead of journalism. Or not. Because I do love journalism, more than just about anything else in the world.

In any case, it was interesting to leave behind sex and gender for a couple of days last week to delve into the world of disease control for my latest piece at The Atlantic, on the polio emergency.

While the number of people affected by polio is lower than ever before (with only 60 cases so far this year), the nature of the disease means that it is almost impossible to contain long term. The choice is not between eradicating polio and letting a small number of people suffer. It is between eliminating the disease and letting the numbers skyrocket back to hundreds of thousands of cases each year.

You can read the whole thing here.