Polio

She had lost too much blood. Four bullets had ripped through her. A surgery was under way and they could not use anaesthesia. Salma Jaffar, the sole survivor of an attack on a polio immunisation team in Qayyumabad, vividly remembers the searing pain as the doctors cut and sewed her up. For 22 days she stayed in the intensive care unit wondering who would pay her medical expenses. The health department owes her two months’ salary and the meagre stipend for vaccination, Rs250 a day, has also not been paid since August.

Health workers in part of a troubled Pakistani tribal region Friday refused to participate in a polio vaccination campaign because of security threats, officials said. The three-day campaign in the Khyber tribal district is due to start on Saturday, almost three weeks after gunmen shot dead a worker while he was administering polio drops and vaccines to children in the town of Jamrud. Efforts to stamp out the crippling disease in Pakistan have been seriously hampered by militant attacks on health workers inoculating children.

The public health disaster in Syria has been a long time coming. In three years of violent conflict, 125,000 have been killed and millions displaced. The recent outbreak of polio has focused the world’s attention, and the international response is welcome. Yet this crisis was both predictable and preventable.

Gunmen have shot dead at least two policemen providing security to a team of polio workers in north-west Pakistan. A polio worker was also killed in a separate attack, local media have reported. The two policemen were travelling from the town of Swabi to Topi by motorbike when they were attacked. The polio worker was shot on the outskirts of Peshawar.

The outbreak of polio in the Syrian Arab Republic announced by the World Health Organization a few weeks ago is a troubling reminder that global conflicts threaten the public’s health. Violence, like the 2-1/2-year-old civil war in Syria, can lead to significant disruption and/or long term damage to the public health infrastructure, including basic sanitation efforts, maintenance of a safe water supply, basic nutritional needs, and disease monitoring and prevention.