Pakistan polio outbreak puts global eradication at risk
October 18, 2013 - A Taliban ban on vaccination is exacerbating a serious polio outbreak
in Pakistan, threatening to derail dramatic progress made this year towards wiping
out the disease worldwide, health officials say. Health teams in Pakistan have been
attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilise
Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012. "We have entered a phase that
we were all worried about and were afraid might happen," Elias Durry, head of the
Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters in a telephone
interview. "The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long
as we have no means of reaching these children and immunising them to interrupt virus
transmission, it could jeopardise everything that has been done so far - not only
in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe." In North Waziristan,
a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens
of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in
the past six months. And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in
some of the country's major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond
these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely
populated areas. Polio is a highly infectious disease that invades the nervous system
and can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours. A $5.5 billion global
eradication plan was launched in April with the aim of vaccinating 250 million children
multiple times each year to stop the virus finding new footholds, and stepping up
surveillance in more than 70 countries. The virus has been cornered to just a handful
of areas in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the three countries where polio is
endemic. Global cases have dropped by more than 99.9 percent in less than three decades,
from 350,000 in 1985 to just 223 last year, according to the GPEI. But so far in
2013, there have already been 296 cases worldwide. Forty-three were in Pakistan, the
vast majority in children in the semi-autonomous Pashtun lands along the Afghan border
known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which include North Waziristan. Accusations
that immunisation campaigns are cover for spies were given credence when it emerged
that the United States had used a Pakistani vaccination team to gather intelligence
about al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was found and killed by U.S. special forces
in Pakistan in 2011. The Taliban ban, and associated security threats, mean the polio
virus could easily escape and spread back into previously cleared areas. (Source:
Reuters)