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India Frees Itself of Polio
An anonymous reader writes "It's been three years since the last recorded polio case in India and health officials hope to officially certify India polio free in the next few weeks. 'Hamid Jafari, director of the WHO's polio-eradication campaign, says the agency's ambitious quest to stop all polio transmission by the end of 2014 is now within reach. If that is achieved, and no new cases crop up for three years, polio—like smallpox—will be officially banished from the planet. "India was one of the most important sources" from where the virus spread to other countries, said Dr. Jafari.'"
These are fantastic news!
Jenny McCarthy wouldn't lie to me!
Given the epidemic of stupid parents that refuse to immunise children nowadays it should not be long till many of the old virus's and diseases rear their ugly heads again.
Current information on the fight against polio can be found here: http://www.polioeradication.org/Dataandmonitoring/Poliothisweek.aspx While India is polio-free, the worldwide cases actually increased last year. Well, let's hope for the best, that the optimistic assessment of Dr. Jafari is true.
Great job on the part of India, the Gates foundation, and all involved. For polio to be eradicated forever would be a great thing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
From the Polio Eradication Website:
Polio remains endemic in three countries – Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. Until poliovirus transmission is interrupted in these countries, all countries remain at risk of importation of polio, especially in the ‘poliovirus importation belt’ of countries from west Africa to the Horn of Africa.
Only 372 cases worldwide last year! If we're careful, if we can convince certain political groups that polio is not an appropriate weapon of terrorism(*), we'll soon eliminate it completely.
Interestingly, polio is monitored from the sewage system in India. Since that appears to work for polio, people are thinking about using this method to monitor other things: other diseases, weapons manufacture, drug manufacture, and so on.
(*) Not making this up - some groups in Afghanistan think that spreading polio is a good way to get back at the Great Satan.
The WSJ:
NPR:
It is honestly great work by many dedicated people that have lead to this. I applaud them without reserve. I just think it is sad that so many poorly informed people work to undermine these great efforts.
As much as everyone likes to hate Bill Gates - India and a number of other countries owe him (and the global Rotary community) for helping in this effort. More on End Polio.
I don't necessarily disagree... but this effort predates the founding of the Gates Foundation by a few decades. We were hearing about efforts to eradicate Polio back in the 1970s!
#DeleteChrome
Next door to India, Polio is making a come back.
Same thing also happening in Nigeria, as well as in Mali.
The common thread in the three locations that is helping Polio making a revival is Islam.
Yes, Islam is helping to make Polio a permanent fixture to the human race.
In Pakistan, they actually KILL health workers trying to eradicate Polio. Same thing happen in Nigeria, where Boko Haram has threaten (and sometimes kill) people trying to stop the spread of Polio.
India will still be at constant risk. This modern secular country is right next to a muzzy hell-hole where attacks on polio workers are frequent. Among the many other things that Islam forbids they have now decided that polio vaccines are unislamic.
yet again this (literally) diabolical 'religion' brings death and suffering to the world.
Don't make a claim and then expect the skeptics to find your evidence for you.
That is true. Here is one case: YLE: Authorities try to track source of mysterious polio virus in Tampere.
Yeah, I knew someone would bring up that one guy who wrote a paper in the Indian medical ethics journal which contained no data to substantiate the claims.
Of course, you could look at another paper discussing polio vaccination and surveillance in India which says that "[t]he programme [of polio vaccination] includes surveillance of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) to detect and diagnose cases of polio at early stage. Under this surveillance, over 40,000 cases of AFP are reported annually since 2007 regardless of the number of actual polio cases".
Could it be that perhaps the correlation between vaccination and NPAFP was because the surveillance was part of the vaccination programme and the temporal relationship was not inherently vaccination -> NFAFP.
So maybe it is time to, as the paper suggests, move the fuck on.
"Well-educated" implies, among other things, the ability to rationally think about one's own religion.
Fact: Many Islamic Terrorists were college educated !
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/opinion/14bergen.html?_r=0
"We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree"
The 1993 attack on World Trade Center
"The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education"
Of the 9/11 attack
"The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina . We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended college"
They were educated in colleges in America as well as in Europe. If they still can't THINK RATIONALLY after getting their college education in WESTERN UNIVERSITIES, who is to blame ?
The Western Universities or that bloody religion of Islam ?
Some people's thinking is so strange. Muslims with a University education commit acts of terrorism. Muslims without a University education commit acts of terrorism. So ... lets redefine "well educated" to mean thinking critically about religion and claim that the common factor is that "uneducated" commit acts of terrorism
It was an unrelated qualitative study, designed to "We conducted a qualitative research to explore care and support for children with AFP after their diagnosis."
I'm aware of that. I wasn't claiming that was the focus of the paper. The point was that the paper provided information about the coincident testing for NPAFP and vaccination, and thus the fact that they would occur together is not evidence for NPAFP causing NPAFP. Which would be why that quoted part didn't include such a claim and was on another line.
Just for fun, though, we have non-polio enteroviruses detected in numerous stool samples of those experiencing AFP and such enteroviruses can be associated with NPAFP. Seems like an possible cause for some of those cases.
There is also this article in 'The Hindi':
The non-polio AFP rate was not correlated with the number of oral vaccine doses that were administered, countered the WHO Country Office in its response. The largest number of oral vaccine doses given in India was in 2004, which had the lowest non-polio AFP rate in the last eight years. Moreover, although the number of oral vaccine doses given in the country had shown a continuous decline since 2007, the non-polio AFP rate had increased during the same period. In Bihar and U.P. too, there were similar trends of reduced oral vaccine doses and rising AFP rates during 2007-2011.
Maybe I'm not making this clear about the paper you're citing. It is a paper that makes big claims and provides no evidence. It's opinion. It's opinion, and an opinion that I have not seen replicated anywhere else, and that I have never seen supported by any other paper, ever. The comment to The Hindi by the WHO country office is in direct contradiction to the claims made in that paper (and for good reason: they were rebutting the paper).
Another interesting quote from the same paper [1] p. 116:
We have seen how polio, that was not a priority for public health in India, was made the target for attempted eradication with a token donation of $ 0.02 billion. The Government of India nally had to fund this hugely expensive programme, which cost the country 100 times more than the value of the initial grant.
It could have cost 40 bazillion times the value of the original grant, and that wouldn't make one iota of difference to the relationship between the polio vaccine and NPAFP.
So, the way it works is that Gates buys pharma stocks, then bribes few officials in India for $0.02 billion to make their country spend 100 times more on the program. Of course, the pharma makes big bucks not only on the vaccines, but far more on life-long "management" of the diseases they caused, all the while Bill's pharma stocks go up. Having been scammed of intellectual property by Microsoft in mid-1990s, I can see that Bill Gates hasn't changed his "ethics" one bit after moving into the "charity" business. It's same old Bill Gates.
And thus, he caught the bus to crazy-town.
NPAFP is a genuine problem, but it is a genuine problem that would be better addressed by addressing NPAFP rather than hanging off the words of one paper by two doctors in one country-specific medical ethics journal with no supporting evidence.
"Mosquitoes are entirely dispensable."
Tell that to the spiders, frogs, lizards, birds, fish, and the thousands of other species that evolved to subsist primarily on mosquitoes.
Also tell it to the aquatic plants that would suffocate and die if not for the mosquito larvae eating the detritus and other waste that would otherwise film the surface of stagnant lakes and create a gas-exchange barrier preventing the passage of nitrogen and oxygen.
The list goes on, but extincting the mosquito would have devastating environmental consequences.
I contracted polio in rural India when I was about 5, 10 years after Salk's vaccine was deployed all over the USA. I had switched schools about six times in k-12, (civil servant dad posted to all the distant corners of the realm). In almost every class, in every school I had another victim as classmate. That is anecdotal evidence with the survivor bias too. How many had died? How many did not even attend school?
Well, I am glad the scourge has been eliminated in India. Hope the fundie clerics do not stand in the way of complete eradication. It is very disheartening the fundie clerics and the Haj pilgrimage is re-introducing it again in far flung regions of the world. If polio found an able adversary in science, it has found a reliable ally in the form of Muslim fundamentalists.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That... (roll)... works. Damn. Well, you guys have to pay for the pizza.
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Don't worry, Jenny McCarthy will be over with a horde of uneducated soccer moms to fuck it all up for you soon enough.
Totally. ... ...
Citation 1: a lot of people have been vaccinated
Citation 2: it has cost lost of monies
Citation 3: it cost the US some monies too
Citation 4: oh, and some of Bill's monies also
Citation 5: Rotary too
Citation 6: new WHO name-and-shame policy
Citation 7, 8: an acronym exists which no-one knows the origin of
Citation 22: Bill really, really wants polio gone. Seriously, he's been campaigning.
Citation 25: the first kind of relevant one to their claims, but doesn't actually seem to say what they say it does
Citation 26: Provides alternative explanation for their interpretation of Citation 25
Citation 27-28: Don't actually speak to the possible relationship and vaccine at all, but rather say that NPAFP is more dangerous than polio (loosely)
Citation 29: my personal favorite. Data which shows that in regions with number of doses, and cases of NPAFP. The winning characteristic is certainly that the claimed result is true, if you cherry-pick the regions for which it is true. i.e. if you look over all the regions and across times then you do find what they claim in two regions: the ones they present.
I'm winding it up there. The first of the 40 citations which is really relevant to the claimed connection between the vaccine and NPAFP is citation 29.
Citations 31+ likewise appear to not actually lend any support to the claim of an association between the vaccine and NPAFP, but rather point out that India has high rates of NPAFP (which is consistent with some of these being caused by enteroviruses spread via the fecal-oral route).
In summary: the paper remains bollocks, and virtually all of the 40 citations actually have 3/8 of FA to do with supporting their claim.
Yes the effort pre-dates the Gates Foundation. But the latest efforts have been partly funded by the Gates Foundation with a challenge grant. The effort was running out of gas until Bill and Melinda stepped up. The greatest thanks should go to the rotarians and health workers in the third world countries where these efforts continue. The logistics required to deliver doses to millions of children in third world conditions is massive.
Oprah! Call Jenny McCarthy, quick! We've got a situation in India that requires ignorance, stat!
Pwned.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
We're able to eradicate diseases effectively when they have no non-human reservoir. That's because if we eliminate all existing cases and prevent new cases for a little while (through vaccination), the disease will die out. For diseases with non-human reservoirs, like rabies, we'd have to eliminate the disease in the entire reservoir population, too, which is infeasible.
In many dioceses the Church also makes selling or giving away condoms a sin. Healthcare workers are also forbidden from recommending condoms for birth control. Marriages that cannot be "correctly" consummated, e.g. one partner has HIV so barriers must be used, are not considered valid.
It's not money and comfort, it's power that attracts many people to the priesthood. Power over parishioners in the case of the parish priest, or really enormous power over the political process affecting the lives of millions when they reach the position of archbishop or cardinal.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You may have not read the full text pdf, since I was quoting from a peer reviewed paper which had 40 citations backing up all figures and facts stated in the paper.