KANO, Nigeria (AFP) – Microsoft founder Bill Gates Sunday lauded progress in campaigns to reduce polio cases in northern Nigeria's Kano region, describing it as victory in the global fight against the epidemic.
Gates was in Kano to assess the impact of polio immunisation in this once polio-endemic state and epicentre of the transmission of the crippling viral disease throughout the world.
"It is fantastic to be here to see so much progress... in reducing the polio burden," Gates told a gathering of political and traditional leaders in Kano.
"The good result we have seen this year in Kano is a combination of good work and some good luck that the virus has not come back from any of the neighbouring countries," he said.
"As long as we redouble our efforts we are on the path of eradicating polio," Gates said as he inspected polio vaccination exercises in some parts of the city as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's global polio eradication drive.
In the last 17 months Kano state, which has been the bastion of polio virus in Nigeria, has not recorded a single polio virus transmission, according to health officials.
Kano became the epicentre of the transmission of the crippling wild polio virus when the state government suspended polio immunisation for 13 months between 2003 and 2004 following allegations by some Muslim clerics and doctors that the vaccine was laced with substances that could render girls infertile as part of US-led Western plot to depopulate Africa.
The suspension led to the transmission of the polio virus to other parts of the world that were considered polio-free while it continued to ravage Nigeria at alarming rate.
Although laboratory analyses in and outside Nigeria proved the vaccine safe, public rejection persisted, prompting a sustained immunisation and information campaigns by health officials and international donors in collaboration with local political and traditional leaders.
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