The MSNBC article posted here or below is entitled "Pakistan aid workers pay the ultimate price for the killing of Osama bin Laden." It is chilling as it describes efforts by Pakistani officials to carve out areas which will NOT allow health workers to administer the polio vaccine. The politics of this are stunning and one can read the extremist rationales behind it in the article.
Those most impacted and to whom my heart goes out are the children who know no politics. Those nations that have been polio free often do not realize the life sentence that will be handed out when a nation state allows and even demands children go unvaccinated. The innocent are the true tragedy of the Middle East mayhem. The innocent get slaughtered. War does that doncha know.
As one who knows polio first hand I know it is a disease monstrosity. Polio as a child ruins or severely impacts the entirety of one's life. It is brutal in its scope. Most of those unvaccinated will suffer the often secondary severe orthopedic wrath of its impact. The ramifications of viral infection are, to say the least, devastating and if one acquires bulbar polio which affects nerves cells that control breathing and the brain stem one will most likely die as there probably are no sophisticated iron lungs or complex technological equipment in underdeveloped nations to keep the afflicted alive.
It is a brutal price the innocent have to pay for adult folly and it will mean decades of unnecessary suffering for them. The disease requires the necessity of a variety orthopedic equipment and even surgeries (if they can get surgery) to be administered when young so that the paralyzed limbs and young bone structures, attendant maladies of the nerve-cell-attacking virus, grow correctly. Some, if they acquire the virus in third world countries, will have their legs amputated or be relegated to moving wooden sleds close to the ground. It will be and in some areas is a pitiful sight. Even with the best medical advancement the deformities can be and often are gruesome. And it is expensive. There is no cure and the paralysis that ensues cannot be medically reversed. There is only life saving vaccination prevention. Whatever nation's objections to anything any other nation may have done, I implore that they NOT take it out on the children with lack of immunization against polio.
Polio is a killer of the functioning of bodies and it is a killer of the spirit as it wreaks its psychological havoc too, even more so in nations poisoned by superstition and the dogmas of irrational belief.
It is a virus not to be ignored and it is an equal opportunity employer. In 1921 it affected US President Roosevelt as it affected the poorest of the poor. Polio is an equal opportunity employer as it does NOT discriminate and it can strike anyone who is unvaccinated in a town, a city or a village near you.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/22/19043539-pakistan-aid-workers-pay-the-ultimate-price-for-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden?threadId=3751522&commentId=77044334#c77044334
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