Leadership (Abuja)
Nwakpa O. Nwakpa
23 January 2009
Abuja — A huge sum of $630 million has been donated by Bill Gates through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in conjuction with Rotary International and the British and German governments to fight polio in Nigeria , with the hope of finally bringing the disease under control in its last four bastions .Other countries to benefit from the donation are India, Pakistan and Afghanistan where this disease is still endemic
Gates, addressing a Rotary conference in San Diego, acknowledged that mobilising armies of health workers to squeeze billions of doses of vaccine each year into the mouths of hundreds of millions of children could not go on indefinitely, even as he voiced confidence that polio would ultimately be vanquished.
"Eradicating a disease is hard, slow, painstaking work," he said. "We can't circle a year on the calendar and say we'll end polio by this date or that date. That sets us up for failure."
Nigeria's flawed effort has most disheartened international public health officials. Almost half the 1,625 polio cases counted internationally last year occurred in that one nation. And the disease has spread from Nigeria to adjacent countries.
"They're harming their neighbours by repeatedly bombarding them with polio virus," said Dr. Stephen Cochi, a senior adviser in the global immunisation division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "These very poor neighbours have driven out the virus only to be reinfected by Nigerian polio virus."
Northern states in Nigeria halted the vaccination campaign for a year in 2003-2004 after the spread of rumors that the vaccine contained AIDS or a Western plot to sterilise Muslim girls. But even after the country rededicated itself to the campaign in late 2004, its performance has been weak, public health officials say.
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