The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced $10 million in grants to the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) and New York City-based UNICEF to develop and introduce a powerful new polio vaccine, part of a strategy to end poliovirus transmission worldwide by the end of 2005.

According to WHO, the new monovalent oral polio vaccine type-1 (mOPV1) will be more efficient at boosting immunity against poliovirus strain type 1 than today's trivalent vaccine, which works against all three polio strains. Epidemiologists believe the new vaccine could help to bring a swift end to polio through mass immunization campaigns across areas where virus types 2 and 3 have already been eliminated. Approximately $4 million of the $10 million will be disbursed by WHO, while the rest will be used to help UNICEF, in partnership with a qualified vaccine manufacturer, develop, license, and introduce mOPV1 by May 2005.

Polio once crippled 350,000 children a year worldwide. But the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has reduced the number of cases by more than 99 percent, to just over a thousand children in 2004. If the initiative is successful, polio will be only the second disease ever eradicated by humankind, after smallpox.

"The Gates Foundation grant plays a catalytic role in mOPV1 development," said Egyptian minister of health and population M. A. Tag-El-Din. "This will help support the national efforts to get rid of the virus once and for all."