UAE and Gates Foundation to honour polio workers with new award

The announcement came ahead of World Polio Day and two years after the Emirates and international partners launched a six-year plan to eradicate the disease, reports Karin Zeitvogel.

Panelists discuss the ongoing fight to eradicate polio worldwide at an event to mark World Polio Day at the UAE Embassy in Washington on Thursday. Courtesy UAE Embassy, Washington, DC

WASHINGTON // The UAE, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to honour vaccinators and others who work to eradicate polio with a new award.

The first recipients of the Heroes of Polio Eradication (Hope) award will be recognised at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi later this year, said the Gates Foundation’s chief economic and policy adviser Geoffrey Lamb at a UAE Embassy event in Washington to mark World Polio Day.

The announcement comes two years after the UAE and international partners, including the Gates Foundation, launched a six-year plan to eradicate polio worldwide, receiving pledges of US$4 billion (Dh14.7bn) from international donors.

Since then, 86.6 million vaccines have been distributed in Pakistan – one of only two countries worldwide where polio is still endemic – as part of the Emirates-led plan, UAE Ambassador to Washington Yousef Al Otaiba told the gathering late on Thursday.

Vaccinators have gone door-to-door in 53 areas of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, as well as tribal areas close to the Afghan border, so far giving the two-drop oral polio vaccine to more than 20 million children under five, he added.

Health workers funded by the UAE-led plan are also working across the border in Afghanistan, where polio is also endemic, though less prevalent.

In a statement released on Friday, on the eve of World Polio Day, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, said the Emirates and its partners would continue its efforts to to spare humanity of what he called a dangerous threat to public health.

“Through its humanitarian relief teams, the UAE has been able to reach the world’s most difficult areas – plagued with wars and conflicts – to deliver anti-polio vaccination doses for children, put a smile on their faces, and nurture their hope for the future that is free from fears of disability,” he was quoted as saying by UAE state news agency, Wam.

Polio, which is caused by a virus transmitted from person to person, invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours, with one in 200 infections leading to irreversible paralysis, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Five to 10 per cent of those paralysed by the disease later die.

But although all countries but two have now been declared polio-free, WHO says that failure to eradicate the disease from these last remaining strongholds could result in as many as 200,000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world.

The six-year plan to eradicate polio completely was developed in April 2013 at a global summit in Abu Dhabi, organised by Sheikh Mohammed and US business magnate and philanthropist Bill Gates.

Before the summit, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative – a public-private partnership involving 200 countries – “lived hand-to-mouth, year to year with funding and that crimps the ability to do important things you need to do,” said Jay Wenger, who leads the polio eradication efforts at the Gates Foundation.

The number of polio cases in Pakistan has fallen from 328 in 2014 to 38 so far this year, while Afghanistan has seen a decrease in cases from 28 to 13, according to the Gates Foundation. Nigeria, which reported 36 cases of polio in 2014, was declared polio-free in September.

“We’ve gone from 350,000 cases a year [in 1988] to less than 100. We’re on the verge – the Foundation sees this as a great opportunity to finish the job and give a gift to humanity of, basically, forever to get rid of this thing,” Mr Wenger added.

Following the work so far, the UAE and the Gates Foundation hope that next year there will be no new cases of polio. After that, if no new cases are reported for another three years, and none of the virus from which polio is contracted remains in sewage systems, then the disease will be considered officially eradicated worldwide.

If that were to happen, polio would become only the second disease to be eliminated after smallpox.

But despite the enormous progress made so far, challenges remain. Vaccinators are targets for militants, including the Pakistani Taliban, who view the health workers as symbols of the state they are fighting an insurgency against. More than 60 vaccinators have been shot dead in the country in the past two years.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories surrounding vaccination drives are widely believed in Pakistan.

In the film “Every Last Child”, which documents Pakistan’s struggle to beat polio and was screened at the UAE Embassy event on Thursday, a group of men in a shop in Pakistan discuss how they believe the polio vaccination programme is a plot by the West to harm their children.

The vaccine “makes girls prematurely adult,” one of the men alleges, while another says that vaccinating children is an attempt to spread Aids. Another man still says vaccinators are in cahoots with western spy networks.

In another clip, a father is seen visiting a hospital in Peshawar with his toddler son, who has been infected with polio. As a female doctor tells the man that his little boy will be fitted with leg braces to help him walk, he begins to cry.

“I just pray that my child will be able to stand on his own legs and walk so he won’t be a beggar in life,” he says.