founder Bill Gates traveled by boat Wednesday to a remote village in eastern India to check on the progress of a government campaign to eradicate polio that the billionaire is helping to fund. Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed nearly $1 billion to health and development projects in India, met with health workers and discussed the strategy to fight polio with immunization drives and an effective surveillance program that identifies cases early. Gates visited Guleria, a village nearly 140 miles east of Patna, one of only two Indian states where new cases of polio continue to be reported, according to UNICEF. Uttar Pradesh is the other. Polio mostly strikes children under 5 and is carried in the feces of the infected and often spread by contaminated water.
