Polio

More than 100,000 health workers fanned out across Pakistan on Monday, stepping up a drive to eliminate the polio virus this year from one of its last bastions, despite continuing militant threats to vaccination teams.Pakistan accounts for more than 70 percent of the world's cases of polio, a virus that can cause lifelong paralysis and is now endemic in only two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Shifts In polio vaccination strategies are helping Pakistan improve health workers safety and immunization rates.

GAZIANTEP, 2 September 2015 (IRIN) - In Syria's brutal civil war, the announcement in late January that the country had effectively beaten polio again was a rare bright spot. It was the result of an unprecedented vaccination campaign in almost all areas of the country, including in the vast eastern region controlled by so-called Islamic State (ISIS). But even this small achievement is now threatened as the Islamist militants have cracked down on aid groups, and others have been scared off by counter-terrorism measures. Ahead of a major push to immunise children across the country, what chance do the more than one million children living under ISIS in Syria have of getting the jab?

An increasingly alarming roadblock to eradicating polio is the rise in attacks on health care workers employed as vaccinators. In 2013-2014, 89 polio workers and their police escorts were killed in Pakistan and Nigeria. What’s most striking about this figure is that it exceeds the estimated number of actual deaths from polio; the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) estimated that between 15 and 30 people died from the disease in 2014.

“Let me treat my patients,” pleads a Syrian doctor whose hospital has been repeatedly targeted. Around the world, attacks on health workers and facilities have reached new heights, and this violence affects women disproportionately. More than 75% of the health workforce in many countries is female, and many women are left without access to much-needed health services.