New Delhi: President A P J Abdul Kalam today (Aug 7, 2004) lauded the coming together of India and Pakistan on the polio front and said the two countries should fight against poverty and diseases rather than amongst themselves.

The President also said that national and international agencies should come together to launch a global mission to eliminate another dreaded disease, HIV/AIDS from the planet.

"India and Pakistan assembling here in the same dais today to fight polio-virus is a beautiful thing to happen," Kalam said at an International Polio Plus Summit, which is also being attended by Health Ministers of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"We have our enemies, common enemies, that is poverty and disease. Let us fight against these enemies instead of fighting amongst ourselves," Kalam said.

In view of the fact that the majority of new polio cases had been reported from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Kalam asked the Union and State Health Ministries to mount a mission mode programme and chalk out a special strategy to make both the States free from the disease.

"Out of 30 polio cases, so far, being reported from the country, 17 are from UP mainly from the four districts of Badayun, Moradabad, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur," he said.

There was a need to establish the causes of occurrence of polio cases and find remedial measures, he said and suggested people must be made aware that there was no side effect of polio vaccination.

Children not brought for immunisation should be traced so that doctors or nurses could be sent to their homes, he said.