After three years with­out a sin­gle report­ed case of polio, India was declared free of polio. It’s been so long since polio was a epi­dem­ic in the Unit­ed States &emdash;which goes a long to way to explain­ing our cur­rent anti-vac­ci­na­tion and anti-sci­ence culture&emdash; that is hard to grasp how mon­u­men­tal this news is for so many peo­ple. The BBC reports that there are only three coun­tries left where polio is endem­ic: Pak­istan, Afghanistan and Nige­ria. Wired recent­ly had an excel­lent long-form piece on the effort to erad­i­cate polio from the planet.