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from the but-look-what-fdr-did-with-polio dept.
The New York Times reports some good news from the health front: it's been a year since anybody was diagnosed with polio in Africa.
The goal had seemed tantalizingly close in recent years, but polio always managed to roar back, particularly in Nigeria. Then officials embraced a vigorous new approach to vaccination and surveillance in that country, hiring thousands of community "mobilizers" to track down the unvaccinated, opening operations centers nationwide to track progress and seeking out support from clerics and tribal chiefs.
The result has been remarkable.
The last African case of polio was detected in Somalia on Aug. 11, 2014, the final sign of an outbreak with its roots in Nigeria — the one country where the virus had never been eradicated, even temporarily. But the last case in Nigeria was recorded on July 24, 2014.
According to Wikipedia, there were 416 cases worldwide in 2013, down from 350,000 in 1988. Since the polio virus only infects humans, this means that total eradication of the disease is now within reach.
The bad news is, polio still exists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we have the CIA and the Taliban to thank for that. In 2011, while looking for Osama bin Laden, the CIA used an immunization campaign as a cover. When this news came out, it reinforced an already widespread belief that vaccines are a Western conspiracy to sterilize Moslems. This means that a lot of people in the region are now either avoiding immunization, or shooting at health workers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2015, @02:46PM
On the other hand, the CIA using the immunization campaign as cover was against every rule in the books among international health organizations, in an attempt to prevent scenarios identical to this one. The CIA in general is not good at managing the larger trade-offs - if you give them a mission, they will complete it come hell or high water, but there are many times when after the fact you really wish they hadn't completed it because of the repercussions for how they did it.
Another way the CIA could have located Osama bin Laden was to cultivate double agents in the ostensibly allied government of Pakistan, because the Pakistani intel services knew exactly where bin Laden was.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.