Polio cases jump in Pakistan

[spindrifter]

as clerics declare vaccination an American plot

Declan Walsh in Peshawar
Thursday February 15, 2007
The Guardian

The parents of 24,000 children in northern Pakistan refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations last month, mostly due to rumours that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilise innocent Muslim children.

The disinformation - spread by extremist clerics using mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations, and by word of mouth - has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan and hit global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. The disease is concentrated in North-West Frontier Province, where 60% of the refusals were attributed to "religious reasons".

<snip>

The scaremongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003, where the disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months. Pakistan is one of just four countries where polio remains endemic. The others are Nigeria, India and Afghanistan.

<more>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2013369,00.html

[Taxloss]

1. What a tragedy.

Ignorance kills.

There was a lot of religious resistance (from all faiths) to vaccination when it was first introduced. It can seem like such a counter-intuitive thing to do - actually introducing a strain of disease into the body.

[Warpy]

2. Not again!

You'd think they'd catch a clue after the same thing happened in Nigeria and resulted in a polio epidemic that took adults as well as children.

Then again, we have the same sort of antivaccination zealots here, blaming the drug companies for plotting against us.

[Horse with no Name]

5. I actually read on the board today

somebody throwing the idea out there that the polio vaccine causes AIDS.

[Warpy]

6. Thank antivaccination hysterics and AIDS conspiracy nuts

There was a theory out there (still is, they learn slow) that has been thoroughly debunked that the AIDS virus did the jump from ape to human when a sloppy polio researcher working in central Africa grew the virus in monkeys and shot contaminated samples of the vaccine derived from them into humans.

The researcher failed to die in time and said the AIDS reservoir was in a completely different species of monkey than he used from the late 40s to the early 60s; forensic virologists place the species jump between 1920-1930, long before he started his research; and the first confirmed death in the US was in 1969, confirmed from frozen blood and tissue samples from a case that was extremely puzzling at the time and certainly before the disease was particularly widespread in Africa and before it had the chance to cross the Atlantic in any great number of cases.

There are still people who cling tenaciously to this idiotic theory, however, instead of applying Occam's Razor and realizing the disease is likely an old one that was only allowed to spread beyond the range of that particular species of green monkey by the development of highway systems throughout Africa in the 70s and 80s. The jump is likeliest to have happened during the butchery of bush meat, contaminated monkey blood flowing into nicked fingers.

Now the theory has come full circle and is being used to spread fear about polio vaccine that has never been anywhere near a green monkey and will result in a lot of deaths among people who are ill equipped to find out the truth.

The truth is that the vaccine is now oral, that HIV ingestion doesn't result in infection (stomach acid destroys it), and that our conspiracy against third world countries relies on shady financial dealings backed up with guns, not microbes.

Don't expect men who gain their power from spreading fear to tell people any of this, though. They'd rather see children die.

[Horse with no Name]

7. Thank you for that history.

I had never heard that theory.
It really sucks that people will die because of idealogy.
Kind of like this war we are stuck in.

[kineneb]

3. a prime example

of what happens when religion trumps science. As a Rotarian, I have been following the progress of the international vaccination campaign. So sad for the little children.

[Horse with no Name]

4. They must be reading DU.

:popcorn: