Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, “has offered to assist Pakistan [with its] health sector in a letter to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the PM office said Tuesday,” News Pakistan reports (Khan, 6/11). “Gates promised to extend financial and technical assistance to the government of Pakistan as far as possible,” Dawn.com writes, adding, “Gates congratulated [Sharif] on assumption of his office, and expressed the confidence that the new government in Pakistan [will place] special emphasis on the immunization and eradication of fatal diseases including polio” (6/11). “Gates said that we must not allow the recent attacks on polio workers to undermine the great work being done in Pakistan. The safety of health workers and the police officers who protect them is critical to the success of eradication efforts, he continued,” according to the Associated Press of Pakistan (6/11). “President Asif Ali Zardari Tuesday said that polio eradication remained a high national priority and efforts in this regard which had been institutionalized at policy and field level would continue unabated as there was a complete ownership of the program by all the political parties as well as from the civil society,” the news service writes in a separate article (6/11).