Polio Vaccination Program At 'Make Or Break' Poing

Polio Vaccination Program At 'Make Or Break' Poing
Hopes of eradicating polio are on a knife-edge with authorities turning to some unlikely sources for help, the World Health Organisation, or WHO, has admitted.
Polio has been 99 per cent eliminated in most of the world since the development of vaccines in the 1950s. Today, oral medicines mean it is almost non existent in the developing world.
But there are three remaining polio problem nations - Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. And the WHO is warning that if it is not tackled in these countries now there is a real danger that the illness will make a comeback - and blight the lives hundreds of thousands of children.
According to Sona Bari, spokeswoman for the polio eradication programme at the World Health Organisation, the world faced a “now or never” moment.
“We are really on a tipping point between success and failure,” she said.
As a result, the WHO is poised to declare a health emergency to attract funding and prevent the spread of the illness by allowing poorer nations to vaccinate visitors from affected countries when they arrive at their airports.

Each of the three countries affected have different problems. In Afghanistan the ongoing conflict with the Taliban makes it difficult for drugs to get to children while in Nigeria, the health system is fragmented and inefficient.
In Pakistan, there is also a problem with Muslim preachers, who preach that the polio programme is an American plot to make Muslims infertile. This has been fuelled by the fact that the CIA used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign last year to detect the presence of Osama Bin Laden.
Now, however, clerics are joining the WHO in arguing in favour of vaccination. Sami ul-Haq, known as the father of the Taliban, recently launched an immunisation drive at his madrassah, near the north-western city of Peshawar, giving oral drops to his own grandson.
“Giving polio drops to children is very much Islamic,” he reassured people.