A group of women bathe, wash and fetch drinking water at the same source at the Tiljala slum area in Calcutta, India, April 24, 2003. Loss of faith, government fatigue and the myth among Muslims that the polio vaccine could cause infertility or impotence in their children led to a dramatic, six-fold increase in polio cases in India last year. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

That¹s solid progress from the 1980s, when India had as many as 200,000 new cases a year. But this South Asian nation of a billion people is one of the world¹s last reservoirs of the polio virus, and each new case increases the chance of its spreading elsewhere.

³We are so close, we cannot allow all our success to go to waste,² said Dr. Anubha Ghose, a pediatrician who herself contracted polio as a child, before there was a vaccine. ³This last push is the most difficult, but we have no option but to move forward.²

Ghose, director of health for the humanitarian group CARE India, said the government has grown weary of the effort to vaccinate all of India¹s children against polio, having spent $300 million on the program since 1996. Officials wonder if the money might be better spent on diseases that kill more children, such as malaria and cholera.

³The bureaucrats who are allocating the money, they cannot say at the end of the day that they saved so many children,² she said. ³We can only say to them: It¹s our responsibility to the world.²

The federal health minister, Sushma Swaraj, recently proclaimed that India would be free of new polio cases next year despite the upturn. She blamed the increase in cases partly on ³fictitious reporting² in previous years by some field workers competing for lower figures.

Polio typically strikes before age 5. It can cripple the spinal cord, causing paralysis and, in some cases, death. It is transmitted through food or water contaminated by the fecal matter of an infected person.

Though polio has been suppressed in many parts of the world ‹ the last case in the Western Hemisphere was more than a decade ago ‹ children worldwide will be at risk until the last case is wiped out.

³If you don¹t eradicate it everywhere, it can come back and then you have to start all over again,² said Dr. Jay Wenger, WHO project manager for the National Polio Surveillance Project in India.

On May 13, WHO and its partners in the global eradication campaign announced that they will cut back on immunization programs in many countries to concentrate efforts in India and 12 other nations.

Carl Tinstman of the U.N. Children¹s Fund said health officials learned a lesson during the past two years when they cut back efforts in India, thinking the virus was well under control.

³It was a misjudgment,² Tinstman said.

When the worldwide effort began in 1988, with a goal of wiping out polio by 2005, there were 350,000 polio new cases in 125 countries. Last year, 1,866 new cases were reported, and polio was considered endemic in only seven nations: India, Nigeria, Niger, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In India¹s West Bengal province, around Calcutta, there was only one new case in all of 2001. Then last year, 48 cases were reported, and in the first four months of this year 22 more cases occurred in the densely populated state, which borders Bangladesh and Nepal, both polio-free nations.

³This should be sending off alarm bells,² Ghose said.

Such alarm doesn¹t filter down into the slums of Calcutta, where hunger and disappointment drown out any calls for global responsibility.

Begum, whose husband is a rickshaw puller, says there is no way she¹ll get the last of the four polio doses for her older daughter, 4-year-old Pinky.

³The more you give the drops, the greater the chance you¹ll get polio,² she says.

Across the city, Mohammed Taher, 14, limps through the sprawling slums around the Park Circus railroad station, along the Ganges River. He doesn¹t go to school and is on his way to his job in a shoe factory.

Taher, whose left leg is badly twisted outward, believes he contracted polio when he was inoculated for measles as a toddler. ³I don¹t know anything about these polio drops,² he says with a shrug. ³Anyway, it¹s god¹s will.²

His neighbors, brothers Dawood and Mustaq Hussein, 16 and 14, also believe it was their fate to contract polio. But they feel it¹s their duty to prevent it in others.

³We¹ve accepted it and we could care less,² says Mustaq. ³We tell the mothers that they must get the drops or their children will end up like us.²

Many of the new cases of polio have been among Muslims like Begum, Taher and the Husseins. Some in India¹s largest minority fear the vaccine is part of a government plot to limit the Muslim population in India, which is predominantly Hindu.

³There¹s some distrust of the government in general because they don¹t get much from the government in general,² said Wenger, the WHO official. ³And what little they do get, they tend to be suspicious.²

Prabhakar Chatterjee, director of health services for West Bengal, said such tales are hard to quell.

He went house to house on the last national polio immunization day, April 6, encouraging parents to give their youngsters the polio drops. One Muslim couple with five daughters and one son resisted.

³I finally convinced them to agree to the five girls,² Chatterjee said. ³But not the son. They worried the family name would die out if the boy was sterile.²