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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 01 2020, @05:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-close-to-total-eradication dept.

It's Official: Africa Has Just Been Declared Free of Wild Poliovirus:

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday declared that Africa was free of wild poliovirus , a landmark in a decades-long campaign to eradicate the notorious disease around the world.

"Today is a historic day for Africa," said Professor Rose Gana Fomban Leke, whose commission certified that no polio cases had occurred on the continent for the past four years, the threshold for eradication.

Poliovirus now joins smallpox on the list of viruses that have been wiped out in Africa, the WHO said.

[...] Poliomyelitis - the medical term for polio - is an acutely infectious and contagious virus which attacks the spinal cord and causes irreversible paralysis in children.

It was endemic around the world until a vaccine was found in the 1950s, though this remained out of reach for many poorer countries in Asia and Africa.

In 1988, when the WHO, UNICEF and Rotary launched the worldwide campaign to eradicate the disease, there were 350,000 cases

[...] Thanks to a global effort and financial backing - some US$19 billion over 30 years - only Afghanistan and Pakistan have recorded cases this year: 87 in total.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:58PM (#1044905)

    Doesn't help that the CIA did actually use the vaccine team as cover for DNA testing to track terrorists.

    Seriously, CIA, Osama was a small fry compared to Polio.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 01 2020, @02:25PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 01 2020, @02:25PM (#1044919) Journal

    And that's not just vaguery. It really made things worse. That event was specifically the launching point of anti-vax hysteria in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It led Islamist aligned militias to threaten the lives of anyone who got vaccines, which meant that even people who might not care about being tracked as a terrorist would still stay home.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @06:20PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @06:20PM (#1045002)
      That beyond stupid act should really be considered a crime against humanity. The people of Afghanistan and Pakistan had already been given plenty of valid reasons to distrust the West and all its works and it took a lot of persuasion to get them to accept vaccination. That one act basically pissed away what little trust and social capital was left. At the rate things are going, it may now take a generation or two of children being needlessly maimed and killed by polio before any serious headway to annihilating the disease forever can be made.
      • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday September 01 2020, @10:28PM

        by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday September 01 2020, @10:28PM (#1045133)

        Good article about it here [nationalgeographic.com].