Word: polio
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...Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for talks on ways to stop illegal immigrants from Africa using Libya as a launch pad to reach Italy . A day earlier, a boat believed to have departed from Libya and carrying 275 migrants was intercepted off the coast of the Sicilian island of Lampedusa . Polio Resurgent AFRICA The World Health Organization warned of the threat of a polio epidemic as the virus returned to two countries where it had previously been eradicated. Guinea and Mali brought to 12 the total of formerly polio-free nations that have seen new cases of the disease since January...
...HEALTH: Polio is proving harder to eradicate than first hoped...
...like voting drives, immunization programs are vulnerable to political winds. In 2001, India was on the verge of becoming polio free?just 268 cases were reported that year. Encouraged by the progress and eager to reduce the $100 million annual cost of funding the program in India, the government scaled back the number of vaccinations. The following year there were 1,600 new victims. A renewed immunization campaign has brought cases down again, but the incident demonstrated how quickly progress can be undone...
...Indeed, some question whether the polio program makes economic sense. The WHO estimates that 5 million cases of polio have been averted since 1988. But $3 billion was spent achieving that result?or $600 for every case avoided. Critics say the money would be better spent attacking deadlier diseases such as malaria, which kills at least a million a year...
...knock out polio first, he adds, it may all be for nothing, and the WHO must keep the pressure on. In the past 18 months, 77 new cases have appeared in nine African countries that were previously polio free. Another has just surfaced in Darfur, Sudan, bordering Chad, where refugee camps are a tinderbox of cramped quarters and unclean water. The world, says Aylward, is like a forest, and one polio case can touch off a wildfire that may take years to put out. "We have gone several seasons without [a forest fire]," he says, "and the brush has gotten...