Science / Medicine : Campaign to Wipe Out Polio

The director-general of the World Health Organization has called for a campaign to eradicate polio from the world by the end of the century.

But Dr. Halfdan Mahler said that in order to achieve that goal, relief agencies and individual countries must significantly increase the amount of money they spend to immunize children against polio and other childhood diseases.

While polio has been virtually eliminated in many developed nations, about 275,000 children are still being paralyzed by the disease in developing countries each year, according to a report presented to the World Health Assembly, WHO’s governing body, at its annual meeting in Geneva earlier this month. Only about half the world’s children are now immunized against polio, the report said.

The WHO, the World Bank, UNICEF and other relief agencies already spend $150 million a year to immunize children against polio and five other major childhood illnesses, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and tuberculosis.

The WHO estimated that the agencies would have to raise that budget to $500 million to achieve the goal of wiping out polio, just as smallpox was eradicated a decade ago.

Rotary International of Evanston, Ill., has pledged to raise $120 million to support the global polio eradication initiative. As of the end of March, Rotary clubs had raised $77.7 million to finance projects in 67 nations to protect 417 million children against the disease, according to Rotary International statistics.

In addition to the efforts by international agencies, individual countries are spending $350 million annually to immunize their children. That effort, too, needs to be stepped up, the WHO report said.