$630-million for push to eradicate polio : Nature News The global drive to eliminate the last pockets of polio infection is to receive a boost of more than half-a-billion dollars from international donors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International and the governments of the UK and Germany this week pledged $630 million over five years for a massive final push to eradicate the crippling disease.

The announcement was made at an international assembly of Rotarians held in San Diego, California on 21 January. Humanitarian group Rotary International, along with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

The Gates Foundation will give Rotary $255 million, with Rotary pledging to raise $100 million, and the UK and Germany contributing $150 million and $130 million respectively to the global initiative. It is the second such grant from the foundation to Rotary International ” in 2007, it gave Rotary a $100 million grant for a polio eradication programme, which Rotary matched dollar for dollar. The new money will go to vaccination programmes, better disease surveillance and research on new vaccines.

Eradication hope

"We are on the brink of eradicating one of the most feared diseases in the world," says Jonathan Majiyagbe, chairman of the Rotary Foundation, the charitable arm of Rotary International. He adds that the big injection of new money should galvanize governments and non-governmental organizations to step up funding and efforts "to end polio once and for all".

If polio is eradicated, it would follow smallpox, which in 1980 became the first disease to be officially wiped out from the planet. The global polio initiative, a mammoth programme involving the vaccination of billions of children, has reduced the number of polio cases by 99% since it's launch in 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases in 125 countries to just 1,600 last year.

Pockets of the disease exist in four countries: Nigeria, where polio vaccines were denounced by religious leaders, and false rumours circulated that they carried HIV and caused female infertility; the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar provinces in India, where vaccine effectiveness has been hampered by poor sanitation and high population density; and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conflict has hampered vaccination campaigns.

Unless the virus is eliminated in these regions, a single case of the infectious disease could spawn new outbreaks of the disease, and export it to the many countries that are now officially polio-free, and so risk undoing the progress already made. The existence of residual pockets of infection is the main reason why the drive to completely erase the disease has so far failed, with target dates repeatedly being pushed back.

Budget gap

But in recent years, the global polio programme has faced funding shortfalls, as government donations have tailed off. The large new commitments by non-governmental organizations therefore offers a much-needed cash injection to finish the job.

Even with the new money, however, the global initiative will still be some $340 million short of the budget it needs for 2009-10."We urge other countries to join us in closing the funding gap," says Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"Rotarians, government leaders and health professionals have made a phenomenal commitment to get us to a point at which polio afflicts only a small number of the world's children," says Bill Gates. "However, complete elimination of the polio virus is difficult, and will continue to be difficult for a number of years."

"The huge costs of the programme mean that the faster we move, the easier it will be," Gates adds, "but I'm optimistic we will be successful."