Word: polio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Occasionally he'd call me up and say, 'I didn't go to the park today,'" smiles Mickey Cobb, the trainer, "but I knew by looking at the room that he went every day." A small, bald man of 44, Cobb began life at 2 lbs. in rural Georgia, polio-ridden and without benefit of physician. He started limping at four. "I couldn't play when my friends were playing," he says, "so I carried the Band-Aids...
...Shanghai Banking Corporation, the Asia-Pacific arm of HSBC Group, the world's second-largest bank by assets and a symbol of British colonial power; after being named to the position last December; in Hong Kong. Cheng, who grew up in a working-class tenement and suffered from polio as a child, embraced social activism in the early 1970s (he was once arrested while protesting the demolition of a squatter camp) before joining the bank in 1978 and rising rapidly through the ranks. On reporting to his new job last week, he said, "I almost feel like I'm Cinderella...
...does not mean nonexistent, and the parents of a lot of at-risk kids are doing nothing to reduce the danger. Ninety-two percent of U.S. children ages 19 months to 35 months receive three or more doses of polio vaccine, but those numbers aren't distributed evenly. Up to 2.1 million children in that age group may be either undervaccinated or entirely unvaccinated each year. Many come from poor or uninsured families with no access to health care or health information. Others are on the opposite end of the demographic arc--well-educated and comparatively wealthy Americans...
Kids left unprotected become part of a dangerous underbrush that can burn fast when a virus hits. The last polio outbreak in the U.S., in 1979, struck a vaccine-averse Amish community, paralyzing 14 people. That virus originated outside the country. "There are people in the U.S. who question vaccinations," says Heidi Larson of UNICEF. "But I think it's because they don't see the impact of the disease around them...
That's not a problem in the countries now struggling with outbreaks of polio and others that lie in the path of the virus. Polio could yet be snuffed out around the world, like smallpox, which was officially declared eradicated in 1980. But it will take more work in the developing world--and less complacency in the developed one--before that happens. --Reported by Helena Bachmann/Geneva, Sora Song/New York and Jason Tedjasukmana/Cidadap...