Gulf nations accused of giving little to fight polio By Donald G. McNeil Jr. The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 9, 2005
With polio surging rapidly through Muslim countries, public health officials trying to eradicate it are expressing frustration that wealthy Islamic nations contribute so little to the effort, despite repeated requests.
Fighting the disease has cost nearly $4 billion since the eradication campaign began in 1985, and the campaign is urgently trying to raise $250 million to handle outbreaks that have taken place this year, but the Gulf states have given less than $3 million so far.
"It would be a good sign for Islamic countries to see other Islamic countries giving," said Dr. David Heymann, the World Health Organization director general's representative for polio eradication. "But they've come in more slowly than we expected."
Kul Gautam, the deputy executive director of Unicef, which buys vaccine for poor countries, said it was unfortunate that donations from wealthy Gulf nations "still make up such a small proportion of the overall contribution to this global public good."
Stephen Strickland, the chief of polio eradication for the UN Foundation, which has contributed $30 million and raised tens of millions more, was more brusque, calling a recent Saudi pledge of $500,000 "peanuts" and criticizing Kuwait for offering nothing while poor Islamic countries like Chad and Burkina Faso struggle to vaccinate millions of children.
Because the new outbreak started in Nigerian Muslim communities that resisted vaccination and was apparently spread by pilgrims to Mecca, "you would think they'd take the lead in this," he said.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an umbrella organization of 57 Islamic countries, agreed that members would "have to increase our efforts" and said he would raise the issue again at a meeting of the conference's foreign ministers in late June.
In 2003 and 2004, the conference urged its members and Islamic charities to donate. In 2003, it noted that six of the seven countries with polio then were members: Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia. (The seventh was India, where the disease is concentrated largely in Muslim areas.)
But those appeals produced only $1.2 million from the United Arab Emirates, $330,000 from Qatar and $100,000 from Oman, plus the Saudis' $500,000 pledge.
Since then, polio has spread to 16 countries, most of them members of the conference, including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Yemen, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Benin, Guinea and Ivory Coast.
