Fight Against Polio Continues

The global fight against polio, the crippling disease for which complete eradication is possible but currently unfeasible due to insufficient resources, has reached a critical point.

The United States has contributed almost $1 billion, including $180 million for the next year from 1988 to 2005 towards the global initiative to eradicate polio. This pledge also included intense participation among other countries with the goal to eradicate polio by 2005 through bilateral assistance and pledging and working with other countries.

One must recognize and thank the Rotary members who decided to take aim at the world's leading cause of juvenile paralysis and salute their efforts to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for this cause and those Rotary volunteers around the world who immunized millions of children.

USAID is pleased to work closely with Rotary and CDC, WHO and UNICEF and many others. In 1988, CDC, WHO and UNICEF launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative that helped eliminate indigenous wild poliovirus from 125 countries and territories. USAID has been working to combat polio for over 20 years now. Today, USAID supports polio eradication in more than 40 countries with a special focus on the 6 remaining endemic countries. To date, the PEI has reduced the number of polio cases worldwide from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 784 cases at the end of 2003. Approximately 5 million cases of paralysis have been averted since the launch of the global polio eradication effort.

USAID remains committed to eradicating polio as soon as possible. The agency has contributed over $300 million since 1988 and their Congressional Directive remains at $27.5 million annually. Currently, the U.S. government provides about 40 percent of the external support for polio eradication between CDC and USAID.

The six endemic countries are Niger, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan as well as the nine countries to which it spread in sub-Saharan Africa, but a true concerted effort is underway to overcome this latest challenge.

From 1988 to 2004 an extraordinary amount of progress has been made, but this is something that truly will take a sustained commitment to not only close the gap, but to keep that gap closed.

The Eradication partnership, which now includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and countless private voluntary organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and private sector corporations, hopefully will turn these challenges into achievements through continued support of the six polio-endemic countries, and urging those governments to continue their commitment towards mass immunization and encourage continued polio eradication efforts.