In 1986 I led a Rotary Group Study Exchange team to the Amazon region of Brazil. Brazil was a fairly modern country then, even more so now, but we were all taken-aback when we saw the surprising number of physically handicapped people among the population. Many of them were begging on the streets.
When we queried our hosts about this they told us that polio was rife in the community. We were shocked of course; the debilitating disease had pretty much been eliminated in the late 1950’s in first-world countries, thanks initially to the Salk injected vaccine and later the Sabin oral vaccine.
In 1979 Rotary International announced a project to wipe out the disease everywhere. There are 18,000 Rotary clubs and 850,000 members worldwide and we were all encouraged to contribute annually to advance this worthy goal.
Poliomyelitis tends to strike the young; in fact when I was a lad it was more commonly known as infantile paralysis, but as recently as 1988 the disease was endemic to 125 countries paralysing or killing 350,000 people each year, mostly children.
The disease can be carried in waterways and this is disastrous for third-world countries. A minute amount of contaminated water can introduce the virus to the mucus membranes of the mouth where it can eventually find its way to the central nervous system, destroying the motor neurons that allow the muscles to move, leading to paralysis of the legs, sometimes the arms and in the worst cases the muscles that control breathing.
The United Nations got behind the Rotary initiative as did the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and in 2007 Bill and Melinda Gates chipped in as well, spending $1 billion of their personal fortune to help Rotary battle the disease saying: “This is one of the smartest allocations of resources the world can make.”
Time magazine recently reported that thanks to the exhaustive philanthropic and political teamwork the virus has been corralled into only three countries Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. In 2012 there were only 215 cases worldwide.
But according to Time, during a polio vaccine drive in Pakistan last December, nine field workers – six of them women or teenage girls – were killed by a motorcycle drive-by shootings linked to the Pakistani Taliban. In January, six more women and one man, all of them medical aid workers, were similarly shot to death. All of that bloodshed followed a Taliban edict last June to halt the scheduled immunisation of 161,000 children in the North Pakistan province of Waziristan until American drone strikes stop.
“In the garb of these vaccination campaigns,” said one piece of Taliban propaganda “The U.S. and its allies are running their spying networks.” This is nonsense of course, but the lie got its legs in 2011 when it was revealed that in the run-up to the killing of Osama bin Laden, a Pakistani doctor masqueraded as a hepatitis-vaccine worker in an attempt to collect cheek swabs from family members in bin Laden’s compound to try to confirm he was living there.
Other outlandish rumours are spread by the Taliban, such as the claim that the polio vaccine contains HIV, or that it’s made from pig or monkey urine, and that its real role is to sterilize children. Whether it’s because of the fear of outsiders or the general suspicion of anything being promoted by that “Great Satan” - the West - the lies gain traction.
Not being able to get to the Taliban-controlled sectors of the world with such a worthy project is monstrous. Polio unchecked moves fast. In 2003 the disease appeared to be near its end and Rotary were contemplating packing their bags and declaring victory when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations on the basis of the rumours about sterility and the HIV contamination. Two years later, polio cases, nearly all of them of the Nigerian strain, were raging across sixteen countries throughout Asia and down to Oceania.
Rotary International calculate that $1 billion spent per year over the next few years to extinguish the last fugitive strains of polio could save up to $50 billion over the next 20 years, both in treatment costs for infected children and in the perpetual hold-the-line vaccination programmes that must be maintained as long as the virus is at large.
Viruses and bacteria have had their way with humans since the dawn of history; a species versus species war we have too often lost. “We are on the brink of wiping out a virus that richly deserves extinction,” says Time correspondent Jeffrey Kluger. “The war may be slow, but there is no tonic like a big victory over a disease to ensure there will be more victories to come.”
Now, if only we could find a vaccination that would eliminate the Taliban.
