Islamabad: Microsoft Corp. co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates said on Friday after a visit to Pakistan that he was ‘encouraged’ by the country’s commitment to polio eradication
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, of which Gates is co-chair, is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a major project between governments and international organizations.
Pakistan, along with neighboring Afghanistan, is one of two countries in the world where polio continues to circulate. No children have been paralyzed by wild polio in Pakistan in more than a year, according to the Gates Foundation, but the virus was detected in December in sewerage samples in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Four wild polio cases were reported in Afghanistan in 2021 and one this year.
“I’m encouraged by the country’s commitment to eradication and am optimistic that if everyone remains vigilant, we can #endpolio,” Gates said on Twitter after departing from Islamabad.
Earlier in the day, after a meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan, Gates told reporters polio eradication could be possible in the coming years in one of the last two countries of the world where the virus is endemic.
“We’re not done but we’re certainly in by far the best situation we’ve ever been in,” Gates said, adding that Pakistan and Afghanistan’s polio eradication efforts were interlinked.
There was a real possibility of eliminating polio in practice in the next few years, but the outcome was uncertain, particularly given the situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban took control in August, the philanthropist said.
“I think the steps taken in Pakistan during 2022 will probably set us up to finish polio eradication,” Gates said. “Afghanistan is a little bit of a question mark because that’s a more complex situation,” he said, adding that vaccination rates had gone up this year after dropping off since 2018, though they needed to be higher.
