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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Polio cases spread in Indonesia |
| 2005-05-05 |
| Four young children in Indonesia are now confirmed to have polio, in the country's first outbreak in a decade. Officials said other suspected cases, all of which have been recorded in the same area of West Java province, were still being investigated. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called on Indonesia - which has generally good vaccination coverage - to step up its campaign. Officials have said they were confident they could prevent a major outbreak. The WHO said on Thursday that two more infants were confirmed to have contracted the disease, after Indonesian authorities announced earlier this week that two other children were infected. Polio is a waterborne disease which usually infects young children by attacking the nervous system. It causes paralysis and muscular atrophy, and there is no cure. Polio vaccination rates across Indonesia as a whole stand at about 90%, but in western Java the rate has been around 55%. Authorities have now launched a drive to immunise five million children in the area. DNA tests done on a viral sample from one of the infected children has determined that the polio arrived in Indonesia from Nigeria, via Saudi Arabia. Experts suspect the strain could have been carried by migrant workers or pilgrims visiting Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia. The disease has all but disappeared in the developed world, but it is still endemic in Nigeria, a problem that was made worse in 2003 when Muslim clerics there spread rumours that the polio vaccine had been contaminated to make Muslims infertile. Until the middle of last century, when a vaccine was discovered, polio was endemic across the globe, and the international campaign for universal vaccination has been one of the great successes in the fight against disease of recent years. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #4 And to think, all this needlessly started in Nigeria, where those phuquing Muslim clerics were spreading their despicable claims about polio vaccination being nothing more than surreptitious sterilization at the hands of the evil United States. Too bad those damned clerics responsible couldn't be lined up and shot. They deserve it. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-05-05 15:31 |
| #3 Indonesia has hundreds of islands whose isolated populations are still in the Stone Age, with little to no contact with the outside world. I can't imagine that the immunization numbers given in this article include such people, as their population numbers aren't even known -- in enough cases it isn't even known if a given island is actually populated. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-05-05 11:07 |
| #2 The problem with polio is its spread by asymtomatic cases. Vaccination is the only way to control it. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-05-05 10:52 |
| #1 If she picked that up during the hadj, there may be a whoooole lotta people walking around with polio right about now. |
| Posted by: BH 2005-05-05 10:44 |