Polio Eradication Program Suspended In Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot

Hugh Pickens writes "Jamal Khan reports that the United Nations has suspended its polio vaccination drive in Pakistan after eight people involved in the effort were shot dead in the past few days. The killings dealt a grave blow to the drive to bring an end to the scourge of polio in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the crippling disease still survives. Militants accuse health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and claim the vaccine makes children sterile. Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country. Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake polio vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest. The Pakistani government has condemned the attacks against aid workers, saying they deprive Pakistan's most vulnerable populations — specifically children — of basic life-saving health interventions. A total of 56 polio cases have been reported in Pakistan during 2012, down from 190 the previous year, according to the U.N. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. Clerics and tribal elders were recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers. 'This is undoubtedly a tragic setback,' says UNICEF spokeswoman Sarah Crowe, 'but the campaign to eradicate polio will and must continue.'"

Comments

Re:How did they drift so far apart?

[Attila Dimedici]

There was a study done a few years back that I think is related to what you are trying to get at. It was observed that certain groups from that part of the world assimilated into British society more readily than others. In particular they studied people from a particular region on the subcontinent and observed that the non-Muslims assimilated more readily than the Muslims, yet this was not necessarily true of Muslims from other regions(although it was true of a larger fraction of Muslims than other groups). They attempted to determine what was different.
When they studied the immigrants from that particular region they discovered that while all of them practiced arranged marriages with cousins, the Muslims from that region practiced patrilineal arranged marriages and the non-Muslims practiced Matrilineal arranged marriages. In addition, the clan structure was patrilineal. The effect was that among the non-Muslims, a young woman left her father's clan and married into the clan her mother came from. This tended to encourage relationships across clan boundaries. On the other hand, among the Muslims a young woman stayed within the clan she grew up in when she got married. This tended to encourage clans to remain divided. As far as I know, the practice of patrilineal arranged marriages is not a doctrine of Islam. However, it appears that most Muslim areas practice it. I wish I could remember the reference for the study because the authors made a compelling case that this practice explained the intractability of many of the cultural pathologies of Muslim countries. In addition, the authors brought in how other cultures with a similar patrilineal marriage pattern had similar pathologies, even when the cultures had few other common elements.