Expert worries over global polio eradication target

A public health expert has warned that the World Health Organisation’s target for the total eradication of polio may continue to be missed with the media, the international community, planners and medics underestimating the complex dynamics of the disease.

Thomas Abraham, director of the Public Health Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, said at the just concluded 7th World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, that the paralysing disease had continued to evade WHO deadlines partly because of the failure to see polio as an epidemic requiring more serious and urgent action.

Abraham said that while the WHO is concentrating its efforts on vaccination in the endemic countries of Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, the disease is busy spreading to West and Central Africa from Nigeria, seriously eroding gains.

And a serious funding problem has arisen, he said, with donors and countries committing only 60 per cent of the money needed to fight the problem. Currently a gap of US$665 million exists, jeopardising the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s final push to eradicate the disease by 2012.

Abraham said this gap in finances is a big source (of) worry: “If the money is not found quickly, efforts to tackle polio will continue to be delayed, and fatigue may set in – with governments and donors going for other diseases that may become a priority tomorrow.”

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Posted by admin on July 15, 2011. Filed under Headlines, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry