Word: viruses
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Yayat is hopeful. She tickles the boy's foot to show it still has feeling, but the foot hangs limp. It may never move again. Just last week polio was officially diagnosed in Fikri, the first Indonesian child to test positive for the virus in 10 years. Three other cases have been confirmed in the area, and hundreds of other children--some suspiciously sick already--are being examined. "The virus has probably been circulating for a month," says Dr. Georg Petersen, an on-site representative of the World Health Organization (WHO). "We can expect more cases...
...that all but wiped out polio in the U.S.--the disease is on the march around the world. Since 2003 polio has been spreading in a fevered band across 16 countries mostly in western and central Africa and the Middle East. And with the news last week that the virus had leaped the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, other nations, including the U.S., have begun to worry about where the disease might turn up next...
...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 clerics in northern Nigeria...
...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 and then returned to their home countries, perhaps carrying more than just their memories with them. Investigators are still looking into the possibility that the outbreak last week in Indonesia was linked...
...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. "It has to be eradicated...