I’m old enough to remember when I was a child the absolute and deranging terror that diseases that used to afflict Britain used to bring out in my parents and older adults. I recall vividly their fear of things like Whooping Cough, diphtheria, Tuberculosis and above all, especially among parents, of Polio. Polio could take a healthy child, in an incredibly short amount of time, to either death or such severe disablement that the child would not be able to breathe on their own and who then spent their entire lives confined to an iron lung. There were people, adults and the children who were among the last cohort of Britons to be afflicted by this terrible disease, all around me when I was growing up. They include the boy in the next bed to me when I was having an ear operation at Great Ormond Street, the 12 year old girl at a campsite who could not walk without iron leg supports and my typing teacher whose wobbling gait betrayed the damage that Polio had done to her when she caught it as a child.
Polio was completely wiped out by vaccination in Britain and indeed much of the world. Millions of children today can pass through the world and not give Polio a second thought. They can play in playgrounds, go swimming and traverse their childhood with that freedom from disease that previous generations did not know.
Polio is to all intents and purposes one its way to being an ex-disease like Smallpox now is and which has been brought about by vaccination. However there are now only two countries on the entire planet where wild Polio still exists. One of these nations is Afghanistan and the other is Pakistan.
Both of these nations are to be quite frank culturally and socially retarded shitholes of the worst kind but Pakistan in particular has it’s own special problems that it faces in the fight to eradicate Polio. Whilst the AP report below does not mention any particular assailant who killed the two police officers who were guarding the vaccination workers, these killings might not be related to any separatist group in the country. Pakistan has had a particular problem with the locals believing a bullshit story, possibly put out by extremist Islamic clerics in Pakistan, that the Polio vaccine is a ‘Jewish plot to sterilise Muslims’. As it is Pakistan those who believe such guff have a tendency to get extremely violent in their pursuit of vaccination workers, hence the need for them to require a police guard when working.
From the Associated Press:
Gunmen shot and killed two police officers assigned to protect polio workers during a door-to-door vaccination campaign in southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, officials said.
The attack in Balochistan province’s Nushki district came a day after the government launched a weeklong campaign to vaccinate more than 31 million children.
The polio workers, who were administering oral vaccine drops to children inside a home, were unharmed, local police official Munawar Zaman said
No group has immediately claimed responsibility.
Separatist militants and the Pakistani Taliban have previously attacked security forces and civilians in Balochistan and elsewhere in Pakistan.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the attack in a statement. Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only countries where transmission of wild poliovirus has not been interrupted, according to the World Health Organization.
Yes, Pakistan truly is a shithole. It’s a country that not only is a hell for women, children, religious minorities and those who wish to think freely, it’s also the country that along with Afghanistan, that is the last lake of wild Polio and it’s become that way because of Pakistani politics and its culture.
Pakistan’s problem with possessing among its population the sort of nutbags who believe that the Jews are trying to sterilise them isn’t just Pakistan’s problem. It’s the whole world’s problem. There’s a lot of travel between Pakistan and the Western world and being one of the world’s last two reservoirs of wild Polio should give us cause for concern. If for example there was, by reason of complacency, in the West a drop in Polio vaccinations or there are adults and children who missed out on Polio vaccination, then it raises the possibility of Polio from Pakistan ending up infecting people in the West. Pakistan could one day be the reason for Polio coming back to countries where it was once almost completely eradicated.
Links
AP story on Pakistani vaccine workers under attack
Hat Tip Centre for the Study of Political Islam International
For the education of younger readers
About Polio. From the Mayo Clinic
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/polio/symptoms-causes/syc-20376512
An Iron Lung
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_lung
Polio calipers
I agree with all you have written, however there is an additional reason why terrorist organisations have been able to get Pakistanis distrust vaccination workers: the CIA used agents embedded with the vaccination teams to gather intelligence to locate Bin Laden and then, with incredible stupidity or incompetence, allowed word of their activities to get out.
I’ve little doubt that this played a part but the driving force does seem to be vaccination reluctance because of the influence of extremist Islamic clerics. The two reasons may have worked together but conspiracy theories about vaccination have circulated in Pakistan for many years.