Reply #11: War on Polio was held back by Muslim fundamentalists [View All]

[muriel_volestrangler]

A momentous campaign appears likely to miss a target to drive polio from Earth by the end of 2005, health officials said, as the disease fought a stubborn last stand in Asia and Africa.
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After an 18-year campaign worth three billion dollars started by US voluntary organisation Rotary International, which includes UN agencies, global governments and health authorities, polio hangs on only in remote areas which have escaped prior immunisation drives.

The Nigerian outbreak took hold after wild rumours circulated that doses of polio vaccine could cause AIDS, or were part of a US-led anti-Muslim plot.

Immunisation resumed last year after a diplomatic offensive which saw interventions by former US secretary of state Colin Powell and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/health/view/147375/1/.html

The historic effort to eradicate polio was jolted last week when the disease reappeared in Indonesia for the first time in a decade, but leaders of the global campaign said they are still confident they will succeed -- and might even make the long-shot target of halting transmission of the virus by year's end.

Since 2003, polio has reappeared in 16 countries that had been free of the paralytic disease for at least a few years, all of it traceable to a strain of the virus that began spreading in northern Nigeria when public fears about the vaccine temporarily stopped immunizations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/09/AR2005050901151.html