According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, Nigeria is one of three countries with an ongoing wild poliovirus transmission problem. The other two are Afghanistan and Pakistan. A big part of the problem is that there have been religious leaders who have banned the use of vaccines, thus allowing the disease to wreak havoc once again.
Following the detection of wild poliovirus in northern Nigeria in 2016 for the first time in two years, Nigeria and neighbouring countries in the Lake Chad Basin (Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad and Niger) have held multiple vaccination campaigns to raise population immunity and prevent spread of the virus. Activities in the area continue to focus on reaching every child with vaccines, especially in identifying and vaccinating missed children and closing immunity gaps in populations that have previously been inaccessible. Countries are also working to increase surveillance efforts.
A range of innovative strategies are being used to reach children in high-risk areas, including opportunistic campaigns that are run whenever security permits, market vaccination, cross-border points and outreach to nomads.
In 2014, Nigeria took a large loan from Japan in order to fund their campaign against polio. As numerous media outlets are reporting, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have announced that they will be paying off that loan on Nigeria’s behalf.
The foundation will pay off a $76 million loan taken from Japan to aid the fight against polio. The loan was taken in 2014 and repayments were due to begin this year. A Gates Foundation spokesperson confirmed the loan repayment in an email to
qz.com.
The news comes as Nigeria counts down to becoming polio free and completing another year without the discovery of any new cases. No new cases were recorded in 2017. That’s a far cry from 2012 when Nigeria accounted for more than half of all polio cases worldwide.
There are problems to be had with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and there are issues to be had with some of the Gates’s philosophies on education, but helping countries to eradicate preventable diseases by paying off debt is something that most of us can get behind.
The Gates Foundation’s intervention is timely for Nigeria as its economy is only just beginning to recover from its first recession in more than two decades. Across the country, state governments have struggled to pay workers’ salaries and the federal government is faced with shoring up the deficit of a $23.9 billion record budget in 2018 by borrowing externally.