Bill Gates urges renewed polio effort

Resurgence could kill thousands:

US: Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates called Monday 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. AFP