The global polio eradication plan raised pledges of $2.6 billion on Tuesday. This sum represents just over half of what is deemed necessary to rid the planet of this scourge, announces the World Health Organization (WHO).
This money, which is to help finance the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) over the period 2020-2026, “will help overcome the remaining obstacles to the eradication of polio, vaccinate 370 million children over the next 5 years and to continue to provide a surveillance network for the disease in 50 countries”, underlines a press release from the WHO.
“No place is safe until polio is eradicated everywhere. As long as the virus still exists somewhere in the world, it can spread – including in our own country. We now have a realistic chance to eradicate polio completely, and we want to seize this chance together,” said Svenja Schulze, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, at the World Health Summit in Berlin.
Thanks to a vaccine that has been around for a long time, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild poliovirus, the best known form of the virus, remains endemic. But two African countries, Malawi and Mozambique, also detected cases of wild polio imported into their territory in 2022.
But health authorities are very concerned about the appearance of cases linked to gaps in vaccination coverage, as was the case recently in the United States or the United Kingdom because of the skepticism of a growing number of people towards the vaccines.
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Le Maroc, “Polio free” areas
Morocco has been declared a “Polio Free” zone by the World Health Organization, thanks to the control efforts deployed by all stakeholders. Thus, underlines the Ministry of Health, no case of wild poliovirus has been detected in the kingdom since the strengthening of vaccination in 1989.
It should be noted that Morocco has deployed all the means necessary for the establishment of an effective surveillance system to detect all cases of acute flaccid poliomyelitis “AFP”. Morocco has, moreover, adhered to the initiative for the global eradication of poliomyelitis, launched by the WHO, for 27 years.
In 2001, the National Reference Laboratory for Poliomyelitis “LNRP” of the National Institute of Hygiene was accredited for the first time by the WHO.