"India winning battle against polio; Reaches stunning milestone of zero cases in one year" by Simon Denyer | The Washington Post, January 13, 2012
MEERUT, India - Today, India is set to reach a milestone in the global battle against polio, recording a full year without a single case of the virus in the country that was long its epicenter and its biggest exporter.
It is a massive global public health achievement that has defied the odds and confounded the skeptics, a victory - reached with US financial support and expertise - that will see India removed forever from the list of just four countries where the crippling disease remains endemic. The other three countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.
Related(?): CIA Pokes Around in Pakistan
The feat raises the very real chance that polio, like smallpox, could one day be consigned to history, and with it the heartbreaking image of the Indian beggar, crawling on twisted, thin legs, pleading for alms....
Maybe it is all for the good, and the fact is the eugenicists of the 21st century have to have some successes or no one would take their stuff. I'm just not trusting them or their mouthpiece media anymore.
In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the global campaign to eradicate polio, the virus was paralyzing 1,000 children around the world every day, nearly half of them in India. Inspired by the success of the smallpox eradication campaign a decade before, the organization aimed to eliminate polio by 2000.
It took seven years before India’s government mustered the political will, resources, and manpower to act. And even when India finally began its first mass vaccination campaign in 1995, the hurdles seemed almost insurmountable, especially in the desperately poor, astonishingly overcrowded plains of northern India, where illiteracy was rife, malnutrition and disease rampant, and hygiene and public sanitation terribly inadequate.
To make matters worse, rumors spread through the massive Muslim population of the region that the polio vaccination campaign was an American conspiracy to wipe them out by making their sons impotent and their daughters infertile.
“There are 500,000 Muslims in this area, but there is no proper drainage, no post office, no bank, no government school, no hospital where a mother can take her child,’’ said Qari Anwar Ahmad, the head of a madrassa in a Muslim neighborhood in the city of Meerut, just 45 miles northeast of the capital New Delhi. “So people were skeptical. ‘Why does the government only care about polio and not about these things?’ ’’ they asked.
Vaccinators were stoned as they approached Muslim neighborhoods. “The general mindset was that the immunization campaign was aimed at ending our lineage,’’ Ahmad said.
That was the start of a massive public education and advocacy campaign, led by Unicef and Rotary International. It began by convincing religious and community leaders that the vaccine was safe and the goal of a polio-free world achievable.
After word came down from some of India’s leading Muslim scholars, Ahmad was finally won over to the cause, first taking the oral vaccine himself and then administering it, in front of a crowd of onlookers, to his 1-year-old son a decade ago.
Today, the mosques of Meerut broadcast to the faithful from their loudspeakers when a vaccination campaign is underway, and imams open vaccination booths.
Thousands of Muslim women like 38-year-old Shabnam Parveen were recruited to spread the message from door to door, gaining access to homes and to mothers that men, especially Hindu men, could never approach.
At first it was hard, Parveen recalled. “Many people in society turned their backs on me because of the work I was doing,’’ she said. “They told me, ‘You are Muslim, and you are still propagating this - you must be earning a lot of money.’ ’’
Families locked their doors from the outside, she said, so she would think there was no one home. Others simply walked away.
Today, none of the 500 families she looks after refuses the vaccine, and coverage rates in the high-risk areas of northern India are as high among Muslims as among Hindus.
Winning over Muslims, though, was only part of the battle.
In India’s vast northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the final strongholds of polio here, half a million children are born every month.
Many of their parents fan out throughout India and the world looking for casual labor on farms and construction sites, potentially spreading the virus far and wide....
--more--"
Then again, maybe they are all about saving lives and entering them into the debt enslavement pyramid or using them for cannon fodder.
Try to get this next post down:
"Afghan polio cases tripled last year" January 18, 2012
KABUL - In a country where insurgents have for years attacked and killed people working for the government or the international community, a small army of vaccination teams connected to both have gone through some of the most dangerous areas, mostly safely.
Appointed by the government, paid for by international agencies, and given free passage by the Taliban, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s 65,000 volunteers and workers had seemed to have nearly wiped out the disease - until recently....
Hmmmm.
Polio is now considered endemic only to Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan - where cases also increased last year - and in northern Nigeria.
“This is a national tragedy to end up with a major polio outbreak,’’ said Dr. Bruce Aylward, the polio coordinator for the World Health Organization.
President Hamid Karzai yesterday in effect blamed the Taliban. “Those who stand in the way of vaccination are the true enemies of our children’s future,’’ he said.
But health care officials said they had experienced no change in the militants’ tolerance for the vaccination efforts.
Internationally, doctors are deeply concerned about the polio increase - not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in Nigeria.
Maybe they just got a bad batch?
--more--"
"Rushdie skips festival in India after threats" Associated Press, January 21, 2012
JAIPUR, India - Booker-Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie canceled plans to appear at an Indian literature festival yesterday after protests from Muslim clerics and warnings that he could be targeted for assassination.
Rushdie’s planned appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival had awakened the long dormant controversy over his 1988 book “The Satanic Versus,’’ which some Muslims consider blasphemous. He spent years in hiding after Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini urged he be killed for writing the book, which was also banned in India.
The head of the Darul Uloom seminary recently urged the government to bar Rushdie from the festival, and the chief minister of the state of Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located, said he should stay away because of security concerns.
Yesterday, they read a statement from the British-Indian author saying he had decided to cancel after being informed by intelligence sources that “paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ me.’’
“While I have some doubts about the accuracy of this intelligence, it would be irresponsible of me to come to the festival in such circumstances,’’ he said.
The controversy over Rushdie’s attendance clouded the opening of the festival. Organizers said they were trying to work out the details for holding an event with Rushdie via video conferencing.
--more--"
"Bus driver’s rampage in India kills 9" by associated press | January 26, 2012
NEW DELHI - A bus driver mowed down pedestrians and rammed cars, scooters, and food stalls in a rampage through crowded Indian streets yesterday that killed nine people and injured more than two dozen.
Police chased the bus for an hour through the streets of the central city of Pune, with traffic officers firing on it in an attempt to stop it, before they managed to arrest the 30-year-old driver....
--more--"
Also see: India may use a Raytheon system
That was tough to get down.
