(Berlin) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Sunday pledged to invest $1.2 billion to help eradicate polio from the planet once and for all, at an international health conference in Berlin.
Posted at 2:10 p.m.
“Polio eradication is within reach. But disease remains a threat […] “, Estimated Bill Gates, co-president of the foundation, speaking via videoconference at the World Health Summit being held in the German capital.
The sum will be donated to the Global Initiative for the Eradication of Poliomyelitis (GPEI), a public-private partnership, whose objective is to end definitively by 2026 polio, against which there is a vaccine. .
This highly contagious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis most often affects children under the age of five. But anyone who has not been vaccinated can catch it.
Since its launch in 1988, the Initiative has helped reduce polio cases by more than 99% worldwide and averted more than 20 million cases of paralysis, the foundation said in a statement.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild poliovirus, the best-known form of the virus, remains endemic. But two African countries, Malawi and Mozambique, also detected cases of wild polio imported into their territory in 2022.
“Despite historic progress in recent years, disruptions in routine immunizations, misinformation about immunization, political unrest and the tragic floods in Pakistan in 2002 underscored the urgency to finish the job on polio,” Judge the foundation.
Another “worrying” fact: variants of the virus have been detected in countries from which the disease had disappeared, such as recently the United States or Great Britain, she underlines.
The GPEI includes the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Rotary International and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), among others. It is funded by public, private and development bank partners.