13 February 2025
Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It gives me great pleasure to join you in inaugurating the Poliovirus Environmental Surveillance Diagnostic Laboratory at the National Polio Laboratory in Muscat, Oman.
This state-of-the-art polio surveillance facility marks a significant milestone in our collective fight against polio and reaffirms our unwavering commitment to public health.
On behalf of the World Health Organization and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, I take this opportunity to congratulate His Majesty Haitham bin Tariq, the Sultan of Oman, and His Excellency Dr Hilal bin Ali bin Hilal Al-Sabti, the Minister of Health of Oman, for their visionary leadership and steadfast support in making this laboratory a reality.
For over two decades, Oman has played a pivotal role in supporting the polio eradication efforts of countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
The National Polio Laboratory in Muscat, Oman, has been instrumental in testing stool samples from children presenting with acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) from Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen for poliovirus.
With the introduction of this new lab, Oman will now also undertake environmental surveillance, which allows for the identification of the poliovirus in communities even before clinical cases are noted.
The lab will test environmental surveillance samples collected from Oman and other countries.
These efforts are critical to supporting countries, such as those in the Gulf Cooperation Council, in detecting and preventing any potential poliovirus importations.
In Yemen, where the prolonged conflict has severely impacted the national health system, and variant poliovirus circulation is ongoing, timely testing by the National Polio Laboratory Oman has been critical to guiding appropriate and rapid action to interrupt poliovirus transmission.
I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the Ministry of Health, the Central Public Health Laboratories, led by Dr Hanan Al Kindi, and the National Polio Laboratory in Oman, headed by Dr Intisar Al Shukri, along with their dedicated teams, for their unwavering commitment to polio eradication efforts.
We are grateful to all stakeholders who have contributed to making this laboratory a reality.
Let us continue to work together, leveraging innovation, collaboration and science to ensure that no child is ever again affected by polio, a debilitating disease that devastates the lives of children and their families.
We look forward to our continued collaboration with the Sultanate of Oman to ensure that children in our region can look forward to a polio-free future.
