IN ONE of its largest grants ever, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $255 million (€197 million) to the push to eradicate polio, a goal that has eluded world health agencies for decades but is considered possible by many.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced the grant on Wednesday to Rotary International, a club that does charitable work, at a meeting in San Diego. The World Health Organisation (Who), in collaboration with other groups, has spent 20 years and $6 billion trying to eradicate the polio virus, aided by $600 million raised by Rotary members.
Since 1988, the number of countries that still harbour the virus has dropped from more than 125 to four – Nigeria, India, Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. These accounted for 1,488 of the 1,625 polio cases reported in 2008. Another 15 countries in Africa and Asia that had eliminated the disease reported 137 cases of polio after the virus was reintroduced by travellers or immigrants.
Dr Bruce Aylward, director of the Who polio eradication programme, estimates it would cost $2 billion to stamp out the virus in areas where wars, natural disasters, difficult terrain, extreme poverty and political interference have kept it entrenched.
Without eradication, the virus will continue to find unprotected children, said Dr Stephen L Cochi of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Should nations eventually tire of funding mass vaccination campaigns, mathematical models have shown infections would soar to 200,000 a year. “The very point of eradication is to go that last mile, or the disease comes roaring back,” Dr Cochi said.
Polio is caused by a highly infectious virus that invades the nervous system. Most of the people infected do not become ill, but one in 200 develops an irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs, that can set in within hours of infection. Of these, 5-10 per cent can survive only with a ventilator because their breathing muscles become paralysed.
Gates, whose foundation has also contributed millions toward eliminating malaria, said a victory over polio would also energise other global health efforts, in the same way the 1977 elimination of smallpox did. – ( LA Times-Washington Post)