Word: polio
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...health officials estimated recently that up to 15% of households with children in the western part of Uttar Pradesh state may have been skipped in recent vaccination drives. In a state with a very high population density and poor sanitation, that figure is large enough to ensure that polio - which spreads through contaminated water and contact with excrement - has made a comeback, just when it looked like the net was closing on it in India. Although 90% of India's districts are polio-free, the disease has spread out this year from its epicenter in western Uttar Pradesh to other...
...once crippled and killed thousands of children annually, has been eliminated in most of the Western world thanks to a vaccine invented by Jonas Salk in the 1950s, but it still survives in some of the world's poorest countries. India seemed to be on the verge of eliminating polio last year, when it reported just 66 cases of the disease, down from 1600 in 2002. This year, however, things have gone horribly wrong with India's polio elimination campaign; 325 cases have been reported already, and at least 23 of them have been fatal. What's caught people...
...This year's polio outbreak has been concentrated in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, home to over 170 million people. It is here, say health workers, that a few ultraconservative Muslim clerics have spread a myth that the polio vaccine is part of an underhanded campaign to sterilize Muslim children and lower the Muslim birth rate. Dr Hamid Jafari, the regional advisor for the World Health Organization (WHO) on polio eradication, says that the majority of Uttar Pradesh's Muslims have got their children vaccinated, but, "in certain places, fatwas have been issued against the vaccine." In those places...
...Jafari adds that paranoia is not the only reason for the hostility to the polio drops. Uttar Pradesh is notorious for being one of the worst-administered regions of India, and most of the state has appallingly bad hospitals and health services. Muslims, who are among the poorest of Indians, bear the brunt of this collapse in the state's health infrastructure. Dr Jafari says: "There's a sense of frustration among many Muslims: they tell the health workers, we've never seen anyone coming to take care of us, why are you coming just to give us polio drops...
...Even more disturbing are the global implications of such paranoia. Dr. Jafari says that genetic analysis shows that the strain of polio from Uttar Pradesh, in the past couple of years, has left India, and spread to at least three African countries that had made great strides against polio - Angola, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This year, he says, the Uttar Pradesh strain of the polio virus has leapt out of India and reinfected two polio-free neighboring countries: Bangladesh and Nepal. "This shows that the continuation of polio in one country is a threat...