The government of Germany and the United Kingdom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $635 million toward eradicating polio. The money will be used to fund vaccination campaigns in northern India and northern Nigeria, the epicentre of the global malady.

“Wild” forms of the polio virus circulate in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, but the virus threatens to spread to other developing countries. Nigeria accounts for 50 percent of new cases.

 

The polio is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route, and statistics show that in the late 1980s there were approximately 360,000 children affected by the malady. The virus attacks the nervous system and can cause paralysis, difficulty breathing and sometimes deaths. Children under the age of 5 are more exposed to the disease.

During the last two decades, the campaign against infantile paralysis was very successful and through immunization programs the number of polio cases was significantly reduced.

 

The polio vaccine was first created in the 1950s. The campaign against polio continued through the 1990s and the result was a decrease in polio cases by 99 percent in 10 years, from 350,000 cases in 1998 to about 1,600 in 2008.

“The value of this eradication initiative in energizing the global health movement can't be underestimated,” Gates said. “It is super-important that we succeed with polio.”

 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates in 2000 and doubled in size by Warren Buffett in 2006. In 2008, Bill Gates announced his decision to dedicate 80 percent of his time to the foundation, in order to deal with global problems such as extreme poverty or educational opportunities for people all over the world.

The main goals of the foundation are, globally, to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, and, in the United States, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.

 

The Rotary group has spent about 633 million since 1985 when it begun funding efforts to eradicate the infantile paralysis and it collaborated since then with the GPEI, the World Health Organization, with the US Centers for Disease Control and UNICEF. The Gates foundation has given $655 million to polio-eradication efforts since the late 1990s. Bill Gates warned the disease would continue to be a difficult problem for a number of years.

Rotary International has 1.2 million members in 200 countries. The organisation adopted the anti-polio cause in 1985.

 

Health officials estimate an additional $350 million is still needed in 2009 and 2010 to support the eradication efforts. “Eradicating polio will be one of the most significant public health accomplishments in history, and we are committed to helping reach that goal,” said the founder of Microsoft.

According to recent estimates, 1,618 children contracted polio up from 1,083 in 2007.