In addressing the emergency Ministerial Meeting on the Final Push toward a Polio-Free World in January 2004, the former UN Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan, declared ambitiously that in the fight against polio eradication, “a final victory is within reach” and called upon Member States to commit themselves as they stood at “the front lines of this last, crucial battle”. Three years down the line, with only four remaining countries still identified as polio endemic, this battle risks slipping away as a $575 budget shortfall threatens to halt and even reverse accomplishments to date.
The principal portal in the fight against polio - the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is the largest public health initiative ever undertaken and came about in 1988 when health ministers from around the world voted to launch a global campaign to eradicate polio. Since then, nearly US $5.4 billion has been invested and some 200 countries and 20 million volunteers have cooperated in immunizing over two billion children.
When GEPI was launched, wild poliovirus was endemic in over 125 countries and paralyzed more than 1000 children each day. By the end of 2006 the virus remains endemic in only four countries and the total the number of number of cases have fallen to 216 per year.
The global Polio Partnership spearheaded by the WHO, UNICEF, Rotary International and US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), has played an instrumental in this success. Through partnering with private foundations, humanitarian organizations, corporations, the World Bank and over twenty Donor Governments (mostly from the West), this cross-sectoral collaborative has raised the lion’s share of the polio eradication bill.
However, Western donors have not substantially increased their level of funding for the current year to offset the increased cost associated with doubling the number of planned immunizations for 2007 and 2008. Subsequently, the current budgetary shortfall of US $575 million needed to interrupt the wild polio virus poses the risk of immunizations being suspended or scrapped entirely.
There exist dangerous precedents of the consequences of breaks in immunizations campaigns where the polio virus, once unchecked, can spread back to previously polio-free areas. Nigeria is a case in point: in August 2003, a number of northern states suspended polio immunization campaigns, following concerns by public figures regarding the safety of the polio vaccine. The result was a new outbreak originating in the northern state of Kano, and re-infecting polio-free areas within Nigeria as well as eight polio-free countries across West and Central Africa.
Summarizing the threat, Dr Lee Jong-Wook, former Director-General of WHO, states that a few hundred cases today “could quickly explode again into hundreds of thousands of cases a year, if we do not maintain our vigilance.” Should another outbreak occur, the Muslim World stands to be the biggest victim given that three of the four polio endemic states - Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan - pertain to the OIC and Muslim children represent 99% of all new cases of polio. However, necessary contributions from Muslim States are from reaching desired levels. For instance, from 1985-2009, the collective contributions of Nigeria (US $3.4 million) and Pakistan (US $7 million) easily surpassed the collective contributions (US $8.6 million) of the principal OIC Donors States.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has strongly advocated over the years for greater financial support from Member States for the GPEI. A resolution passed by the 10th Islamic Summit (2003) acknowledged GPEI’s role in reducing annual polio cases by 99% while another Resolution passed by the 31st Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM, 2004) called upon Member States and philanthropic organizations in the Islamic World to provide the resources necessary to protect children from polio and eradicate the virus entirely by 2005. To present day, the Resolution of the 31st ICFM is yet to be realized: apart from the three polio endemic Member States, cases were also registered in 2006 in other Member States including Somalia, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Yemen.
The convening of the 34th ICFM in Islamabad in May 2007 and the OIC Health Ministers Conference in Kuala Lumpur in June 2007 will present a renewed opportunity for OIC Member States to come good on the commitments made in previous sessions and develop concrete actions plans incorporating financial pledges.
To this end, Dr. Bruce Aylward, Coordinator of the GPEI and Mr. Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation, briefed the OIC Ambassadorial Level Group Meeting in Washington DC on April 24 2007 on the status of polio, where things stand and what OIC Member States can do to meet the $575 shortfall in Polio Eradication Funding.
While participating OIC delegates have pledged to convey to their respective countries, the importance of placing polio eradication high on the agenda of the upcoming meetings, such an initiative alone may not suffice, as political support for polio eradication initiatives have also been attained in the past. The real challenge lies in garnering the support of their respective finance ministries to contribute monetarily to meet the GPEI shortfall. If the finance ministers can be brought on board, OIC Member States will have well and truly placed themselves on the front lines of this last, crucial battle.
