Gates: With polio eradication, 'no child will be crippled again'

On the warpath against polio, former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said this week that pursuing eradication will save money and lives and actually reduce population growth.

In an interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Gates said that despite many more deaths from AIDS and malaria, polio should be targeted for eradication because the time is right.

Polio rises to the top because we have a unique opportunity over the next several years to eradicate the disease. Only smallpox was ever eradicated, so this would be the second. And if you don't intensify it, if you don't raise the money to get it down to zero, it'll come back, and that means it will be crippling and killing over 100,000 kids a year. So the value of making sure you've got the budget and the intensity to get rid of it, it pays off unbelieveably because no child will ever be crippled again.

Gates has received criticism recently for pursuing (through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) what some bioethicists say is a fool's errand -- that is, that the amount of money and effort needed to eradicate the last tiny little bit of polio will cost far more than simply controlling it at 80 or 90 percent.

The New York Times reports:

Although caseloads are down more than 99 percent since the campaign began in 1985, getting rid of the last 1 percent has been like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death. As the vaccination fist closes in one country, the virus bursts out in another.

But Gates says willingly accepting hundreds of thousands of crippled children a year is simply unacceptable.

In the interview, Couric asks how much money it will take.

Gates responds:

The campaign costs almost a billion a year for the next two years. We have $700 million more that we've got to raise. I'd be stunned if we let the financial piece be the reason that we let this disease get back out and spread around.

Gates adds that the afflicted countries are among the poorest in the world, including Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The problem, he says, is that the polio virus will escape from those countries and affect countries like the United States that have long since eradicated the virus, threatening health, economy and stability.

Here's the full interview:

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com