Afghan president urges Taliban to allow polio vaccine teams

(January 20, 2012) Afghanistan's president is urging the Taliban to allow teams conducting a polio vaccination campaign access to areas under their control. Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday that anyone hampering the medical workers was the enemy of their children's future. Afghanistan is one of just three nations where polio remains endemic. The two others are Nigeria and neighbouring Pakistan. Last year, the government registered 80 new cases of polio, most of them in the restive southern provinces. That figure was three times higher than the total for 2010. The polio virus, which usually infects children in unsanitary conditions, attacks the central nervous system, sometimes causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death. The news of the increase in Afghan cases came just days after India announced that it had marked a year since its last case of polio - a major milestone in a country once considered the epicentre of the disease. There were 604 cases of polio worldwide in 2011 and India will only be judged to have eradicated the disease if it stays infection-free for another two years.