Word: polio
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...years health officials were remarkably successful in trying to eradicate polio. In 1988 there were 350,000 fresh cases of polio in 125 countries, most of them in the developing world. That year four groups--WHO, Rotary International, UNICEF and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)--made it their goal to vaccinate polio out of existence, and with the help of private and government funding, they came tantalizingly close. By 2003, the virus was confined to six countries--Nigeria, Niger, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India--and was seemingly headed for extinction by 2005. But nobody reckoned on the Muslim...
...summer of 2003, leaders of the region stopped polio inoculations after rumors spread that the vaccine could transmit AIDS and render girls infertile. It was a bad time--and a very bad place--to halt vaccines. There are now 35 million Nigerian kids under age 5, and 20% have no polio vaccinations. Says Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesman for WHO's Global Polio Eradication Initiative: "That's a lot of breathing space for the poliovirus to survive...
...thrive: the Nigerian case load grew from 202 new victims in 2002 to 355 in 2003, then jumped to 792 in 2004. And although vaccinations resumed last summer, by then it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Cases of polio genetically consistent with the Nigerian strain had begun popping up, in succession, in more than 10 neighboring countries, including Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire and Sudan. Last November the same virus appeared in Saudi Arabia, two months before the hajj, when 2 million Muslims from around the world descended on Mecca...
...Even combined with last year's Nigerian totals, that's microscopic, epidemiologically speaking, in a world in which more than 1 million people die each year of malaria and 3 million die of AIDS. But big contagions start small. What's more, only 1 in 200 cases of polio actually causes paralysis, with the rest simply leading to fever, flu-like symptoms or no apparent illness at all. That means that for every child with paralytic polio, 199 may be carrying--and spreading--the virus. "This is a disease that can't be controlled," says Rosenbauer...
...other countries in which polio has re-emerged are getting intensive attention too. In Nigeria there are six nationwide rounds of vaccinations scheduled for 2005. In other countries, such as Yemen, Egypt and India, the immunization program is getting a boost from a so-called monovalent vaccine, which more effectively knocks out the Type 1 poliovirus circulating in those areas. But even the best immunization campaign will leave a lot of poliovirus at large, at least for a while. WHO and other groups still hope to eradicate the disease this year in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where polio was endemic...