New Telegraph-Admin 
The Rotary International Foundation has spent over $300 million on polio eradication in Nigeria.
The Chairman of the Board of Trustees (BoT), Mark Maloney, disclosed this while conducting polio immunisation at a Primary Healthcare Centre in Jahi, Abuja, yesterday.
According to him, polio eradication is Rotary’s number one priority worldwide and it is focused on eradicating the variant Type Two Poliovirus cases discovered in 2024.
Maloney said efforts towards eradicating the polio variant should be intensified, adding that recording success in the area would be beneficial to the Nigerian government.
He also praised the Federal Government’s polio accountability programme as well as all Rotarians for their efforts in combating the disease.
He said: “We have committed, over the course of many years, over $300 million to polio eradication in Nigeria alone.
“And we are pleased to work with the Nigeria National Polio Plus Committee, and we are very pleased with the work that they are doing.
“The Nigerian government is facing a significant challenge with the continuation of variant polio type 2, and we’ve seen so far about 92 cases through the cases that have been evaluated in 2024. “Rotary can only do so much.
We are a private organisation, but we encourage the government to redouble their efforts to put the focus on polio eradication as they did with the wild poliovirus, and they were successful.
Such that I think the last case occurred in 2016, and along with the rest of Africa, Nigeria was declared wild poliovirus free in 2020. Now, we need to work on this variant of polio.
“I know that there’s great pressure to work on many different health areas, but if we can succeed in getting these last few cases of variant polio finished, then the government won’t have to worry about polio in their health programme.”
