Because things aren’t bad enough yet in Syria.
The World Health Organization says it believes polio has erupted in war-torn Syria, a dire development in the fight to eradicate the disease.
The Geneva-based agency says a cluster of more than 10 paralysis cases have been detected in Deir Al Zour province in eastern Syria, a contested area of the country.
The WHO’s senior official for polio eradication says initial tests indicate polio is the cause, and efforts to address what could be a crisis situation are being geared up.
Dr. Bruce Aylward says the potential exists for a large scale outbreak that will take some time to bring under control.
That’s because the collapse of health services during the civil war has meant there are young children in Syria who haven’t been vaccinated.
Where there’s misery, there will be more misery.
While polio remains endemic – meaning transmission has never been stopped – in only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, several countries this year have seen spread of polio resume as a result of imported viruses. Among them is Somalia, where polio vaccination efforts were abandoned for four years because of conflict in the southern part of the country.
Misery—>worse misery.
And polio will only getting worse in Pakistan, thanks to the US’s use of a vaccination program to track Bin Laden.
Trebuchet, the way you focus on the U.S. is ridiculous paternalism.
Local leaders have chosen to actively convince people that not inoculating children against a crippling disease is their religious or tribal duty. Parents are then choosing to act upon that message and reject medical advice from doctors on the ground. Those are the responsible parties if children later become infected with polio when a vaccine was freely made available to them.
In fact whether the U.S. actual did something is totally irrelevant. The whole thing could be a paranoid fiction and people could still act just as irresponsibly, which is precisely what happened with vaccinations in Nigeria in recent years.
@Katherine
But of course, the Poor Little Dears are without moral or intellectual agency of their own. They exist only as moral scourges against the Big Bad West.
So, again, it all boils down to poliotics.
Or pox, for short. Boils’n’all.