The incidence of polio in Pakistan hit a 15-year high on Wednesday, as the prime minister vowed to rid the country of the crippling disease in the next six months despite a Taliban campaign to kill workers distributing vaccines for it. From the AP:
Dr. Elias Durry, who heads the World Health Organization’s polio eradication efforts in Pakistan, told The Associated Press that authorities have already registered 235 polio cases since January. WHO data showed that the last time numbers were higher than that was in 1999, when 558 cases were documented.
Pakistan is among the world’s only three countries where polio, which can cause paralysis and death, remains endemic. Militants regularly target vaccination teams in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and elsewhere in the country, accusing polio vaccine workers of acting as spies for Washington and saying the vaccines make boys sterile.
The disease, which mainly affects children, struck thousands of Pakistanis in the 1980s, but after a long-running vaccination drive it fell to its lowest point yet — 28 cases — in 2005, the figures show. After that, Taliban threats and attacks set infection rates on the rise.
“We refuse to see our children getting disabled for life,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in a statement during a high-level meeting on the subject in the capital, Islamabad. “We will make Pakistan a polio-free country in the next six months,” he added.
Local militants in the country’s North Waziristan tribal region banned polio prevention teams from the area in 2012, stopping vaccinations and driving the resurgence of the disease, which hits the area disproportionately. Across the country, militants have killed about 60 workers and police escorting polio teams since then.
A major government offensive that began last summer has driven many most militants from the area, however, and displaced some 800,000 people who now can be vaccinated in more accessible areas, said Aziz Memon, a senior official at service organization Rotary International.
“I think Pakistan can eradicate polio through properly conducted anti-polio campaigns. Now it is quite easy to vaccinate those children who missed the campaign since 2012 because of militant threats to the polio workers in North Waziristan and elsewhere in northwest Pakistan,” Memon told the AP.
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Global Health and Development Beat
The WHO says the ongoing polio vaccination campaign is facing resistance in Central African countries. The United Nations has been assisting six countries in the region with synchronized vaccinations after Cameroun and Equatorial Guinea reported more than a dozen cases of the wild polio virus in less than three years.
In Uganda, an estimated 16 women die every day from childbirth-related complications. Obstetric fistula is usually a result of prolonged, obstructed labor, but socio-economic factors such as poverty, lack of education and early marriage contribute to its onset and development.
One of the world’s leading AIDS activists has accused Britain of “signing a death warrant” for South Africans in need of treatment after withdrawing aid from an influential campaign group, which now faces ruin.
A federal prosecutors’ office has alleged irregularities in the way Brazil pays Cuban doctors participating in a program set up to provide health care in remote areas, and is urging the country to pay the physicians directly rather than through their government.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon launched the Global Media Campaign against Female Genital Mutilation. The campaign recognizes the critical role of the media around the world in adding its voice and reach to help end FGM.
The WHO elected a longtime veteran of the U.N. agency as the head of its Africa office on Wednesday, amid criticism of its handling of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Sierra Leone said Wednesday it was holding a journalist in a maximum security prison after a guest on his radio show criticised President Ernest Bai Koroma’s handling of the Ebola outbreak.
Scientists across the United States say they cannot obtain samples of Ebola, complicating efforts to understand how the virus is mutating and develop new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics.
The World Bank’s president on Wednesday reported mixed progress in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa, pointing to encouraging signs in Liberia and a more worrisome trend in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
The WHO released new guidelines aimed at reducing the number deaths related to opioid overdose covering a range of drugs – from morphine and heroin to painkillers such as oxycodone – that claim nearly 70,000 lives each year.
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Spotlight on PSI
PSI recently announced its new partnership with Mercy Corps to support a public information campaign to stop Ebola in Liberia. We’ll be applying a world of knowledge from campaigns and ads our network created, here are a few examples from earlier anti-malaria efforts recently highlighted in the PSI Impact blog:
1. Tanzania Television Ad for Ngao Mosquito Net Treatment
In Africa, malaria-infected mosquitoes usually bite between dusk and dawn. The distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets has been a major factor behind the 49% decrease in malaria cases in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000-2012. PSI is the world’s largest distributor of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. But not every bed net out there has been insecticide-treated — and the treatment itself wears off after a few years — which is why in Tanzania PSI worked with the private sector to introduce insecticide treatment tablets to the market, demonstrated in this ad from 2003.
3. Malaria Ishindwe! campaign in Kenya for net distribution and treatment
In 2013, the PSI network added 168,995 years of healthy life through its malaria control programs in Kenya. When early campaigns focused on fear and “shock and awe” did not have great results, PS Kenya developed a new umbrella campaign called “Malaria Ishindwe!” (“Down with Malaria!”), alluding to a common phrase used by preachers in churches as a rallying cry against evil. Learn more about the campaign.
5. South Sudan Hunter ad for net distribution
While pregnant women and children under five years of age are most likely to die from malaria, it’s important that messaging appeal to everyone, including men. Here’s an ad from PSI in South Sudan, where PSI’s malaria control programs added an estimated 3.5 million years of healthy life in 2013 alone.
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Capital Events
Thursday
7:30 AM – World Affair Councils of America 2014 National Conference – WACA
12:00 PM – EconNet: Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City – IADB
4:30 PM – A look at the Ebola Crisis – SAIS
Friday
7:30 AM – World Affair Councils of America 2014 National Conference (Day 2) – WACA
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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Disclaimer: Opinions presented in this email do not necessarily reflect the views of PSI.