The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged Sunday to invest $1.2 billion to help eradicate polio from the planet once and for all, at an international health conference in Berlin.
“The eradication of polio is within reach. But the disease is still a threat (…)”, estimated Bill Gates, co-president of the foundation, speaking by videoconference at the World Health Summit that takes place in the German capital.
Polio is a highly contagious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis, most commonly affecting children under the age of five. But anyone who has not been vaccinated can get it.
Several cases in the West
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild poliovirus remains endemic. But two African countries, Malawi and Mozambique, also detected cases of wild polio imported into their territory in 2022.
“I misjudged the historical progress of the last years, the interruptions of routine vaccinations, the erroneous information on vaccination, the political troubles and the tragic floods in Pakistan in 2002 because of the urgency to end the work concerning polio,” he judged. the foundation.
Another “worrying” fact: variants of the virus have been detected in countries from which the disease had disappeared, such as the United States or Great Britain recently, he stresses.
The GPEI brings together the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Rotary International and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States, among others . It is financed by partners from public, private and development banks.
Source: BFM TV
