This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My name's Steve Davis, I'm the president and CEO of Path.

And my solvable is that we can in the next couple of decades eliminate or eradicate five to ten diseases

that are causing enormous human suffering today.

So our solvable today is a scary one and an exciting one,

eliminating or eradicating a number of horrific diseases.

If you want to freak yourself out and you've got some time,

you could check out the roll call of the top diseases on the World Health Organization's hit list.

That list includes Ebola and Zika and something called Disease X, which represents the knowledge

that a serious international epidemic could be caused by something that we don't even know about

yet.

Disease X sounds terrifying, but of course there are plenty diseases that we

do know about, which we can try to fight, and they're the ones you're going to hear Steve Davis

talk about in this episode. These diseases are some of the world's biggest killers, and the

organisation Steve runs, Path, is working to either eradicate or eliminate them.

So top of Steve's list is polio.

Polio is one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century.

It can cause permanent paralysis and it's potentially deadly.

There's no cure for polio, but there is a vaccine. Successful vaccination programs mean the US has

been polio-free since 1979. And globally, the number of reported cases has fallen by 99% in 30 years.

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