Friday, November 24, 2017

Polio update

Doctors are hoping to eradicate polio the way they eliminated smallpox.

CDC report on the program.
CDC notes the support services for the locals are the unsung heroes.

 With more than 300 personnel at national, state, and local government area levels supporting the program’s projects across the states and local government areas, the National Stop Transmission of Polio (NSTOP) programs train health care professionals, native to and living in their respective countries, in polio eradication and field epidemiology. Modeled after the CDC-World Health Organization (WHO) STOP program, the programs receive financial support from the CDC and other international agencies, while receiving technical assistance from CDC’s Global Immunization Division and Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Programs (FELTPs).

their reports are quite technical. But for a holistic report on the problem:
StrategyPage has this snip about the problems of doing this in war torn areas.

In northwest Pakistan police arrested five members of the Pakistani Taliban as a result of tips from local residents. Under questioning one of the five admitted who they were and what they were up to..... The five were planning attacks on the polio vaccination effort and any other government operation they could get to.
Vaccination teams are particularly vulnerable because they must visit the most remote and lawless areas to deliver the vaccination to vulnerable children. Parents tend to favor the vaccination and given the proliferation of cell phone service it is rather easy to call in or text a tip about some threat to the vaccination effort.
The Afghan Taliban appear to have realized this but some of their Pakistani counterparts have not or just don’t care. Because of this the Pakistani Taliban have become the major obstacle to finally wiping out polio.
In the last decade the main obstacle has been Islamic terror groups who ban polio vaccinations and attack anyone trying to deliver the vaccine to vulnerable children. Islamic terrorists in general tend to believe the vaccination teams are spying for the government and that the vaccinations are a plot to sterilize Moslems.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan there are still religious problems with vaccination. The Afghan Taliban now openly support the vaccination program but there still some rural areas where local Moslem clerics or teachers continue to denounce the vaccinations. There is a similar situation in Pakistan, where some fringe Islamic groups still try and kill members of the vaccination teams.
Despite the death threats there is another major effort this year to vaccinate vulnerable Afghan and Pakistani children against polio. In 2016 there were 20 cases of polio in Pakistan and 13 in Afghanistan. There were four in Nigeria, a country that is expected to be free of polio this year or next. Despite this continued resistance polio cases in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to decline. For Afghanistan there have been at least six cases so far in 2017 compared to 13 for 2016. In Pakistan the situation is similar with about the same number of cases in 2017. Nevertheless the global vaccination effort has worked. In the 1980s, when the polio elimination effort began there were 350,000 cases in 125 countries.
For the last several years there have been fewer than a hundred cases worldwide. After a few years of no reported cases polio will gone, as happened with smallpox in the 1970s.


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