Eradicating Fatal Ignorance

"If you do not take care of this reservoir, it will keep threatening other parts of the country as well. Then the final eradication would be much more difficult."
Elias Durry, head, World Health Organization's Pakistan polio eradication effort

A Pakistani child is vaccinated against polio by a health worker in Islamabad, Pakistan

An impoverished, backward, religion-ridden area of Pakistan is the locus of a malicious disease whose devastating effects as a destroyer of children's health and future has been conquered throughout the modern world. With the exception of three locations: Pakistan, where in Peshawar, poliomyelitis thrives as a threat; Afghanistan, where the virus commutes to; and Nigeria, where the government focuses on persecuting homosexuals rather than eradicating deadly viruses.

Pakistan, particularly in the Northwest Frontier provinces, in Waziristan and other mountainous godforsaken areas of the country, is criminally backward in its government's ability to protect the most vulnerable of the population, its children.There is an estimated 260,000 children living in unsanitary conditions, providing the perfect venue for polio contraction, who have remained unvaccinated, leaving them dangerously vulnerable to the disease.

This dread disease attacks the nervous system and it is capable of killing or paralyzing its victims. Those who are infected with the virus bring the disease with them when they leave the tribal regions of North and South Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. Many flooded into Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Paktunkhwa province, in fear of the violence associated with the fighting among tribal forces and government troops.

The WHO and the government take regular test samples of the sewage water in Peshawar, along with samples from other cities across the country. In the last six months scientists detected the highly contagious polio virus in all samples collected from within and around Peshawar. Pakistan has faced pressure externally to eradicate the disease. Efforts have been interrupted by deadly attacks against health workers and the police who are dispatched to protect them.

The UN's WHO has found that 90% of the polio cases around Pakistan are genetically linked to Peshawar. If the conditions there that stimulate the presence of the polio virus are not successfully eradicated they will continue to infect other areas of the country as well as Afghanistan. As long as vaccination teams continue to face deadly opposition reaching children in those areas of the northwest that represent the polio virus's crucible, the solution will remain evasive.

Pakistani health worker, Nooman Mehboob gives a child a polio vaccine, in Islamabad, Pakistan

And children will continue to be laid low by the disease, many suffering lifelong aftereffects, many more never having the opportunity to grow into the future, struck dead at an early age by a disease the rest of the world has long since conquered. But as far as the ignorant Islamist fanatics representing the tribal North and South Waziristan are concerned, the vaccine has an entirely other purpose.

It is used in a nefarious Western plot to sterilize Muslim children. While their campaign to ensure that Muslim children are not immunized does indeed sterilize Muslim children, morbidly, mortally.