GATES CONTINUES TO PUSH POLIO ERADICATION

Bill Gates sets goal of wiping out polio — forever

‘I’m betting money, reputation, energy, everything’ on ending it

   Half a century after the March of Dimes put the 20th century’s most feared childhood disease on the road to eradication, Bill Gates today declares polio his top priority and challenges world leaders to finish the job before the disease roars back.

   “We are on the threshold of eliminating polio once and for all,” the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist says in his 2011 annual letter, given in advance to USA TODAY and slated for public release today.(more after the break)


 In an interview, Gates warns, however, that outbreaks in Nigeria, Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo provide a “scary” reminder that decades of progress will be lost without sustained action.

   India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are now the only countries that have active transmission of the disease. Gates says the biggest threat to the success of the Global Polio Eradication initiative in those countries and elsewhere is a $720 million funding shortfall for this year and next. Gates says he is putting the full weight of his influence on the line to rally world leaders to wipe out the disease.

   “Clearly, I’m betting money, reputation, energy, everything we have to help polio eradication this year,” he says.

   Last Wednesday, Gates traveled to the United Arab Emirates to meet with Pakistani ministers and seal a $17 million partnership with Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to fund polio vaccinations. On Friday, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates and British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that Britain would give about $62 million.

   The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plans to boost its $200 million annual contribution by $102 million this year, Gates says.

   Gates also is working behind the scenes. He recently met privately with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in Washington to urge him to provide full backing for Pakistan’s eradication plan. “Pakistan can do better for its children,” Gates says.

   More than two-thirds of Pakistan’s polio cases occur in the districts where Pakistani troops are battling insurgents, says Michael Galway, the Gates foundation’s Pakistan expert.

   Children in the USA also are at risk, experts say. Parents who don’t vaccinate their children because they are fearful of vaccine side effects create pockets of children susceptible to the virus.

   “If you increase the number of unvaccinated children, you increase the chance that this virus will find new subjects,” says David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story.

   In 1988, when the global polio eradication effort was launched, the disease killed or paralyzed 350,000 children a year worldwide. By last year, the total dropped to fewer than 1,500, says Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization.

   If Gates provides the final push for polio eradication — joining March of Dimes co-founder Franklin Delano Roosevelt and vaccine pioneers Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin — he may be remembered as much for providing the “knockout blow” to polio as for founding Microsoft, Oshinsky says. “Bill Gates is finishing the work that FDR started,” he says.