oyuki

Thursday, August 25, 2005

For the children

This is not happy news, polio is making a comeback. It started two years ago in Nigeria when fundamentalist Muslim clerics claimed the polio vaccine was a US plot to cause sterility and/or spread HIV. For 10 months there were no vaccinations in the Kano state of Nigeria. As a result at least 1050 children have been paralyzed. Unfortunately the disease has spread from Nigeria to hit Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and even disaster ravaged Indonesia. In Saudi Arabia the government plans to vaccinate everyone under the age of 15 who arrives for the Hajj this year who can not show proof of prior polio vaccination. In Indonesia, in spite of media stories of infants dieing from the vaccine, the World Health Organisation and UNICEF in conjunction with the Indonesian government plan to launch a massive vaccination program of 750,000 vaccinators at 245,000 posts to halt the spread which has already claimed 225 people in Indonesia.

I sincerely hope they stop polio cold and finally rid the world of the dread disease; no more leg braces for children, no more fear of certain seasons, and no fear of being trapped in one's own body for life.

Sources:
SFGate.
BBC News.
Reuters.

1 comment:

RightWingRocker said...

Just another case of these terrorist fratknockers killing people off in the name of trying to make free people look bad.

RWR