Microsoft founder and a business magnate, Bill Gates has pledged to donate 1.8 billion dollars for the cause of eradicating all polio types.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend the amount as a part of their six-year plan as announced at the Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi, The Independent reports.
Gates said that the statistics showing annual mortality rates have fallen from 20 million children to 6.9 million, is his ‘all-time favourite’ chart, adding that humanity has almost done something which was never thought to have been done before.
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Bill Gates. File pic/ AFP
The couple has become the world’s leading philanthropist since 2000 when they announced that they would donate most of their 67 billion dollars fortune to charitable causes, out of which 37 billion dollars has already been donated for noble causes.
The lives of 3, 50,000 children in 125 countries have been blighted by the disease every year since 1988 when the goal of getting rid of the disease had been laid down.
Today, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria remain to be the only countries fighting with the deadly disease, with only 19 cases reported each year.
Gates has claimed that the plan is not to just eradicate polio completely but bring a global immunization to the effect that all children are protected under life-saving vaccines.
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