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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 12 2015, @03:21PM
Talking about our own hippies or the Taliban? I suppose it doesn't matter.
Note that the most famous anti-vaxxer in the UK was just doing insider trading, I don't think he intentionally sprung a worldwide conspiracy theory, he just wanted to collect a bunch of money by entering a ton of financial trades before releasing falsified data and next thing you know instead of owning a small pacific island in retirement he's stuck leading a social movement on Oprah or WTF.
Anyway just pointing out there's more to anti-vax than just CIA dirty tricks.
As a side issue, since the government has no ethical or moral lower bound, I wonder if they were not just sneaking around under the cover of vaccinations but actively and intentionally infecting them with something. Presumably horrific diseases are destabilizing and maybe they figured they'd benefit from destabilizing the Taliban once it became clear the west wasn't going to be in charge. If it sounds like it would work, or that some idiot could be convinced it would work, other than the minor issue of being a war crime, then you can safely assume we were doing it, cause its not like morals or ethics ever stopped "us" before. So yeah we probably have been injecting target populations with "something" the only question is, what?