October 6, 2024

Last month, six United States government employees were awarded the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. Since 2002, the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington DC based philanthropy founded by Heyman, has awarded the medal, known as the Sammies, to 760 federal government employees.

“Each spring, the most interesting organization that no one’s ever heard of collects nominations for the most important awards that most people will never know were handed out,” writes Michael Lewis in a Washington Post profile of Christopher Mark, one of the Sammie winners this year.

One Sammie, notes Lewis, “went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India.” The doctor is Hamid Jafari, who won the award in 2013, for managing a public health program run jointly by the government of India and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Polio is a contagious viral illness that mainly affects children and can cause paralysis, difficulty breathing and sometimes death. In the late 1940s to the early 1950s, polio crippled about 35,000 people each year in the United States alone. With the widespread use of vaccines developed in the 1950s, the United States became polio free by 1979.

Between 2006 and 2009, reports of annual polio cases in India ranged from 559 to 874, comprising 43 percent of the confirmed cases worldwide. For years, experts doubted whether polio could be eradicated in India because of the size of the population and the fact that the virus has persisted in the poorest communities with the worst sanitation and water.

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