Polio Eradication Quotes

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

Nigeria and Pakistan are two countries that have had a lot of trouble with polio. And part of the reason is that there's a lot of political unrest, and people really distrust what the government is doing. That has an effect on people's health, and it has an effect on the health of children.

I really do think cancer will largely be a solved problem. I think most of the infectious diseases like malaria - our foundation is very involved - once we're finishing polio eradication, then starting up this malaria eradication, and getting that done as fast as we can.

If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.

With polio, we've gone several years with no polio in all of Africa, but now with this we're having to go and mop up in that whole region, so it's a bit of a setback for polio. So in parallel we have to go back and get rid of those cases.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to live and work in places like Canada and the U.S. where polio no longer threatens to rob the livelihoods of innocent children. As a young woman, I stand behind the women around the globe who are leading the charge against polio and working relentlessly to achieve a polio-free world.

In Jamaica, we eradicated polio many years ago, but there are a lot of kids suffering in Africa still.

I've seen people talk about how they stopped polio, that was a generation that came together and said, "Let's do this." I think in the AIDS community we've become so complacent in that, it's like we just plateaued... We've completely neglected a whole young generation that is now highly infected.

One of the things polio does is it takes away your energy. They don't know very much about it. They should be a lot more aware of what polio is.

Every child is a gift of Allah, and every child in Pakistan, to me, is like my own child, so I will do my best to take the message to every doorstep in Pakistan. Reaching every child, every time with the polio vaccine is not only necessary, but it is our duty. This disease can't deter us; we will defeat it.

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities.

We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.

My fear is that if we don't take remedial steps to control polio in the tribal areas, we will be faced with international sanctions.

We've actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.

I think disease and all the things that we treat are tied to national security in a lot of ways that we maybe don't realize or that the American people don't realize. If other countries have a chance to be stable, then that helps us. If there are ways we can prevent if there are ways we can help other countries defeat diseases, we're about to totally eradicate polio. And can you imagine? That would be so terrific.