Perth, Australia - World leaders Saturday added their weight to a push to eradicate polio, pledging millions of dollars in new funds to bring an end to the crippling and potentially fatal disease. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who is hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, said her country would spend Aus$50 million (US$53.5 million) over four years towards the global fight. "While polio remains anywhere in the world it is a threat to anyone," she told a joint press conference with leaders from Britain, Canada and two of the world's four polio endemic countries -- Pakistan and Nigeria -- by her side. "We are here today to demonstrate our commitment to ending the fight against polio, that is ending polio for all time." Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his country would commit further funds for polio surveillance and immunisations without giving a figure, while philanthropist Bill Gates pledged US$40 million in new funding. "We're at a crossroads," Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said via a video message, adding that recent cases in China highlighted the risk of polio spreading back across the globe. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said he would raise annual spending on fighting polio from US$17 million to US$30 million from 2012. Jonathan said while the disease had been reduced by 75 percent in the African nation, it remained present in some states and had started to make a comeback over the past year. Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government in January pledged 40 million pounds (US$64.5 million) to fight the disease, said the world was in sight of eradicating the disease. "Today for the vast majority of countries polio has been eliminated and the harrowing images of children in iron lungs banished to the past," he said. "But for all this progress we haven't quite finished the job and the truth is that nearly eradicated is just not good enough." Because polio, which remains endemic in India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is highly contagious, a single infected person can spread the disease to hundreds of people before it is detected, he said. "So if we fail to get rid of polio we run the risk of seeing it spread back to countries from which it has been eradicated," Cameron said. Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said he was concerned that polio had re-emerged in his country, which shares a long, rugged and porous border with Afghanistan. (*)


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