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Showing posts with label
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Showing posts with label
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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It is good to know that even once is a while, world leaders are united towards a good cause, and not fighting each other...
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Posted: 29 October 2011
PERTH, Australia: World leaders Saturday added their weight to a push to eradicate polio, pledging millions of dollars in new funds to bring an end to the crippling and potentially fatal disease.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who is hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, said her country would spend A$50 million ($53.5 million) over four years towards the global fight.
"While polio remains anywhere in the world it is a threat to anyone," she told a joint news conference with leaders from Britain, Canada and two of the world's four polio endemic countries -- Pakistan and Nigeria -- by her side.
"We are here today to demonstrate our commitment to ending the fight against polio, that is ending polio for all time."
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his country would commit further investments in polio surveillance and immunisations without giving a figure, while philanthropist Bill Gates pledged $40 million in new funding.
"We're at a crossroads," Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said via a video message, adding that recent cases in China highlighted the risk of polio spreading back across the globe.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said he would raise annual spending on fighting polio from $17 million to $30 million from 2012.
Jonathan said while the disease had been reduced by 75 per cent in the African nation, it remained present in some states and had started to make a comeback over the past year.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government in January pledged 40 million pounds ($64.5 million) to fight the disease, said the world was in sight of eradicating the disease.
"Today for the vast majority of countries polio has been eliminated and the harrowing images of children in iron lungs banished to the past," he said.
"But for all this progress we haven't quite finished the job and the truth is that nearly eradicated is just not good enough."
Cameron said the world now ran the danger of going backwards on ending the disease which mainly affects children.
"If we fail to get rid of polio we run the risk of seeing it spread back to countries from which it has been eradicated," he said.
Polio remains a challenge for the 54-nation Commonwealth, with three of the four of the world's endemic countries -- India, Nigeria and Pakistan -- members. Afghanistan is the fourth state in which the highly contagious disease has not been eradicated.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said he was concerned that polio had re-emerged in his country, which shares a long, rugged and porous border with war-ravaged Afghanistan.
"This situation is totally unacceptable," he said, adding that medical staff often had difficulty reaching those in need given the difficult terrain and the problem of insurgents.
In areas where the oral vaccine was most needed, he said, there were people who were "so fanatical they don't let the doctors into this area".
"But we are trying our best," he added.
Gillard said it was possible the disease, which in 1954 held Perth in its grip, preventing Britain's Queen Elizabeth II from staying onshore during her maiden visit Down Under, could be ended for ever.
"Change is possible," she said. "This is an issue which within our lifetime was a problem right around the world. Now we are in grasping distance of the end of polio worldwide and that is what we are determined to do."
- AFP/wk
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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
World leaders vow to fight polio
Isn't this encouraging, a man who made so much money is now sharing his fortunes?
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Bill Gates urges renewed polio effort
Posted: 01 February 2011
NEW YORK: Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a renewed global effort to wipe out polio, warning that a resurgence of the disease could cripple and kill thousands.
"Eradicating polio is not something we can hesitate over now and say we'll get it done later," Gates told a packed room at the New York house where Franklin Roosevelt recovered after being stricken with polio at age 39, before he ran for president.
"If we stop the intense pressure we have put on polio, the virus will spread again," Gates told the audience which included famed violinist Yitzhak Perlman, who contracted polio at age four, Roosevelt's grandson Jim and grandchildren of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who invented vaccines against the disease decades ago.
Gates pleaded for a "renaissance" of awareness and of funding to fight polio on the day the annual letter of the philanthropic foundation he set up with his wife, Melinda, was released.
This year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's letter focuses on what the software billionaire called a "terrible disease that kills many and paralyzes others."
Polio killed 350,000 children worldwide in 1988, the year a global effort was kicked off to try to make the disease only the second after smallpox to be eradicated.
"Since then, vaccination coverage has increased significantly and the number of cases has gone down by 99 percent," Gates said. "That's incredible progress, but the last one percent remains a true danger."
The Microsoft founder said the dangers of polio had slipped from the forefront of the minds of people in the developed world, where the illness was eradicated decades ago.
Young Americans are unaware that polio killed or paralyzed 24,000 people as recently as 1952 in the United States, and have never seen "grim hospital wards full of children in iron lungs that maintained their breathing," Gates said in his letter.
Not only is waning awareness in the developed world of the severity of polio threatening to derail efforts to end it, but the global economic crisis has seen donor nations cut aid budgets as they rein in spending.
Two billion dollars are needed over the next two years to eradicate polio, and "there's a $720 million shortfall," Gates said.
Gates said his foundation could fund 15 percent of the effort to wipe out polio, but called for donor nations to follow the lead of Britain and Abu Dhabi and not cut funds for polio eradication.
British Prime Minister David Cameron joined Gates last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos to pledge 130 million dollars to help eradicate the disease.
Days before that, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan also announced a grant to fight polio, which remains endemic in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan and recently resurfaced in southwest Africa and Tajikistan, after a decade with no cases.
"The majority of cases in 2010 were in countries that had been polio-free until the virus travelled back across borders and caused outbreaks in areas where people had gotten lax about vaccination," Gates said in his letter.
"Polio is kind of like fire. You have to damp it down or it will flare up in places, like it has in Tajikistan or Congo. It's a terrible thing and that is why getting to zero is so important," Gates told the gathering in New York.
Wiping out polio would save the world up to $50 billion over the next 25 years, not to mention the countless children it would spare the pain of paralysis or even death, he said.
"If eradication fails because of a lack of generosity on the part of donor countries, it would be tragic," said the billionaire philanthropist, whose foundation gives about $200 million a year to fight the disease.
-AFP/sf
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Bill Gates urges renewed polio effort
