...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...
is still endemic, and efforts to stamp it out have been badly affected by attacks on vaccinators like Sumbal.
In the 2000s Pakistain looked on course to wipe out polio after a series of vaccination drives brought the number of cases down to just 28 in 2005, from more than 18,000 in 1993, according to Unicef data.
But from 2008 the epidemic rebounded and in 2014 hit a 15-year high, with 210 cases -- 80 per cent of all the polio cases in the world.
The problem is concentrated in the northwest, wracked since 2007 by a homegrown Taliban insurgency, and the main city Beautiful Downtown Peshawar
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
has gained an unenviable reputation as the "world capital" of polio.
A Taliban ban on vaccination in North and South
Wazoo tribal areas, on the Afghan border, has left hundreds of thousands of children unprotected from the virus.Adding to the problem, many of the poorly-educated population believe unfounded rumours about the vaccine containing pork or being a Western plot to sterilise Moslems.