| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Polio: Pakistan's shame |
| 2015-12-04 |
| [DAWN] THIS year's likely tally of new polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... cases reported across the country may be lower than corresponding periods before, but Pakistain has no reason to be sanguine. The ugly reality of this crippling illness here is thrown into even starker relief when it is considered that globally, the number of cases reported over the course of 2015 is at its lowest in history, according to a report released earlier last month by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Sadly enough, the two countries still considered polio-endemic that stand in the path of success are Pakistain and Afghanistan; Nigeria, until recently the third country thus classified, was taken off the list in September. On Wednesday, came further bad news. Two children in Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... were confirmed as having contracted the poliovirus, bringing the number of new cases to four in just three days in the city. Significantly, both these children are said to have been administered the OPV. This is not for the first time that such failure of the vaccine has been reported. The difficulty in reaching every child is well known, as are the problems of misconceptions about the vaccination, refusals and the ever-present security threat. More focus is needed, though, on the apparent failure of the vaccine to immunise a child. One reason is the interruptions in the cold-chain storage process, which render the vaccine ineffective. On a few instances, vials have also been found to be past their expiry date. An official of the emergency operations centre for polio in Sindh threw up another possibility about the two most recent Karachi cases: that the children may have compromised immune systems, which may have "assist[ed] the vaccine". It is true that vaccine-associated paralytic polio is a reality, though the incidence is fractional. |
| Posted by:Fred |