AZ ZUHRAH, Yemen (AP) - Ahmed Ali Taher laid his wailing granddaughter in the shade of a barn, held out her limp legs and pleaded for a miracle. In this dirt-poor region along the Red Sea, 1-year-old Ismaa is one of hundreds of Yemeni children struck down this year by polio - four years after the country thought it had beaten the disease forever.
"We've had Rift Valley Fever, dengue fever and malaria. But polio is the worst thing to ever hit our village," said Taher, who believes he is over 70 years old, but has no birth records to be sure. "Some might have died from the others, but then their suffering is over. Polio leaves children paralyzed like this, with no hope."
Yemen got rid of polio once - for a period of four years after the last case was reported in 2001. But since late February, more than 470 Yemeni children have been hit with the disease, more than one-third of the total 1,273 cases detected worldwide this year.
| Virtually all in Muslim countries, but the AP doesn't mention that. |
The Yemen cases all stem from an outbreak in Nigeria two years ago, which occurred after Islamic clerics urged parents to boycott the vaccine for fear it was part of an American anti-Muslim plot. The polio that then erupted in Nigeria spread first to Chad, then to nearby Sudan - and then across the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
In some cases, the virus was carried by jobseekers and in others by Muslim pilgrims. "The Islamic world took a real beating because of the idiocy of what the clerics did in northern Nigeria," said Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Program. But, he added: "Islamic countries should be praised for doing so much to bring the spread of polio back under control."
| Guess the vaccine wasn't so un-Islamic after it reached the master land. |
Intense international efforts are under way. In Yemen, health officials backed by WHO and UNICEF recently held the fifth nationwide vaccination round this year. A total of about 3.8 million children under age 5 received two drops of vaccine each.
Thousands of health workers and volunteers, many of them Yemeni women dressed in head-to-toe black chadors, went door-to-door checking for children to vaccinate. In some of Yemen's remote mountain areas, the people carrying the vaccine were hoisted up in baskets to villages perched on rocky outcrops to reach children.
The number of new cases has plummeted, with the last Yemeni child testing positive Aug. 11. Health experts predict polio could be wiped out here - again - by later this year.
But the upcoming Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia could prove a key test. Saudi authorities now demand that all children under age 15 who enter the country prove they've been vaccinated before obtaining a visa - and then receive another vaccination on arrival.
Such measures will come under close scrutiny during the pilgrimage in January, when more than 2 million Muslims are expected to travel to the country.
In another effort, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated half the $50 million needed by WHO to vaccinate 50 million children during an 18-month global eradication project.
| Wonder if the Saudi press will thank the infidels? |
In more than 30 developing nations, polio has either never been wiped out or threatens to re-emerge, as it did in Yemen.Here, the low immunization rates, poverty and limited health services were the factors behind the rapid spread. Many ill-informed Yemenis also believe the vaccine causes the virus, which has meant thousands of children have gone without proper immunization.
Nationwide polio vaccination programs stopped in 2001 after the last polio case was reported, leading to a massive fall in immunization levels among almost 4 million Yemeni children under age 5.
Thus, when the virus was carried here by Sudanese traveling across the Red Sea on centuries-old sea routes, there was little defense in this village of clay and straw huts, built on the flat plains of Yemen's steaming hot and humid western Hudaydah province. Hudaydah's 2.1 million people live in Yemen's poorest and most underdeveloped region, where oppressive heat, crowded towns and woeful sanitation provide perfect viral breeding grounds. |