...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...
in a restive Pak tribal region near the Afghan border after the Taliban banned vaccinations there nearly a year ago, a UN official said Thursday.
The first polio case was detected in the North
Wazoo region, also known as the strong bastion of Taliban and al Qaeda linked bad turbans, earlier this month, with officials expecting a "bigger outbreak" of the disease."This is the second child, a 36-month-old boy getting paralysed after contracting polio," the World Health Organisation's senior coordinator for polio eradication in Pakistain, Elias Durry, told AFP.
Tribesmen in North Waziristan had endorsed the Taliban ban and stopped authorities from vaccinating children under a nationwide campaign in June last year.
"The problem is that it is just a tip of the iceberg," Durry said, adding, "This is what will happen if we have children without polio vaccination."
He said: "We fear there will be more cases in North Waziristan, its neighbourhood and other tribal regions and northwestern districts if the vaccine is not administered to the children." He said there were approximately 161,000 children in North Waziristan district alone who have not been administered with a polio vaccine since June last year.
The Taliban have alleged that the vaccination campaign is a cover for espionage.
Efforts to tackle the highly infectious disease have been hampered over the years by local suspicion about vaccines being a plot to sterilise Musselmens, particularly in Pakistain's conservative and poorly educated northwest.
Pakistain, Afghanistan and Nigeria are the only three countries in the world where the highly infectious, crippling disease remains endemic. Infections shot up from a low of 28 in 2005 to almost 200 last year.