World leaders yesterday added their weight to a push to eradicate polio, pledging millions of dollars in new funds to bring an end to the crippling and potentially fatal disease.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who is hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, said her country would spend A$50 million (US$53.5 million) over four years toward the global fight.
“While polio remains anywhere in the world it is a threat to anyone,” she told a joint news conference with leaders from Britain, Canada and two of the world’s four polio endemic countries — Pakistan and Nigeria — by her side.
“We are here today to demonstrate our commitment to ending the fight against polio, that is ending polio for all time,” Gillard said.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his country would commit further investments in polio surveillance and immunizations without giving a figure, while philanthropist Bill Gates pledged US$40 million in new funding.
“We’re at a crossroads,” Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said via a video message, adding that recent cases in China highlighted the risk of polio spreading back across the globe.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said he would raise annual spending on fighting polio from US$17 million to US$30 million from next year.
Jonathan said while the disease had been reduced by 75 percent in the African nation, it remained present in some states and had started to make a comeback over the past year.
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government in January pledged ￡40 million (US$64.5 million) to fight the disease, said the world was in sight of eradicating the disease.
“Today for the vast majority of countries, polio has been eliminated and the harrowing images of children in iron lungs banished to the past,” he said. “But for all this progress we haven’t quite finished the job and the truth is that nearly eradicated is just not good enough.”
Cameron said the world now ran the danger of going backwards on ending the disease, which mainly affects children.
“If we fail to get rid of polio we run the risk of seeing it spread back to countries from which it has been eradicated,” he said.
Polio remains a challenge for the 54-nation Commonwealth, with three of the world’s four endemic countries — India, Nigeria and Pakistan — members. Afghanistan is the fourth state in which the highly contagious disease has not been eradicated.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said he was concerned that polio had re-emerged in his country, which shares a long, rugged and porous border with war-ravaged Afghanistan.
“This situation is totally unacceptable,” he said, adding that medical staff often had difficulty reaching those in need given the difficult terrain and the problem of insurgents.
In areas where the oral vaccine was most needed, he said, there were people who were “so fanatical they don’t let the doctors into this area.”
“But we are trying our best,” he added.
Gillard said it was possible the disease, which in 1954 held Perth in its grip, preventing Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II from staying onshore during her maiden visit Down Under, could be ended forever.
“Change is possible,” she said. “This is an issue which within our lifetime was a problem right around the world. Now we are in grasping distance of the end of polio worldwide and that is what we are determined to do.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS