Al Jazeera :
Continuing and sustained polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2022 are likely to determine whether the world can entirely eradicate the debilitating virus, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has said on his first visit to Pakistan, one of the two countries where the disease remains endemic.
Gates spoke to reporters at the end of a daylong visit to the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Thursday, during which he met Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, top health official Dr Faisal Sultan, and other leaders.
Gates, a US-based billionaire who made his name as the co-founder of tech giant Microsoft, is also the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a key funder of worldwide polio eradication efforts, as well as supporting Pakistan’s Ehsaas cash grant scheme for low-income families and the country’s new Raast digital payments system.
“I think that 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, but the quality of health work in Pakistan, the improvements that various parties coming together, and the current data suggest it’s really the work that we do in the next year or two years that will bring us to zero.”
Last year, Pakistan reported just one case of the wild polio virus, and the country has now gone 12 months without a new case being reported for the first time since data on the virus has been recorded.
In Afghanistan, four cases of polio were reported in 2021, with the country’s first case in 2022 reported last week in Paktika province, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).
