Berlin (AFP) - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged Sunday to invest $1.2 billion to help eradicate polio from the world, at an international health conference in Berlin.

"The eradication of polio is within reach. But the disease remains a threat," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Foundation, in a video address at the World Health Summit currently taking place in the German capital.

The money will be paid to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public-private collaboration that aims to eradicate by 2026 the disease for which an existing vaccine could be used.

This highly contagious disease invades the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis. It most often affects children under the age of five. But it may infect anyone who has not received the vaccine against it.

Since its launch in 1988, the initiative has helped reduce polio cases by more than 99% worldwide, and prevented more than twenty million cases of paralysis, the foundation said in a statement.

Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only countries in the world where polio is classified as an endemic disease.

However, two African countries, Malawi and Mozambique, detected in 2022 cases of polio that entered their lands.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation considered that "despite the historic progress recorded in recent years, routine vaccinations, misinformation about vaccination, political unrest and the catastrophic floods in Pakistan in 2022 highlighted the need to complete the work on polio."

Among other "disturbing" indicators: the monitoring of variants of the virus in countries from which polio had been eradicated, including recently the United States and Britain, according to the foundation.