For forty days, Kunle Adeyanju – a Nigerian, Rotarian, polio eradication advocate and biker - rode for more than 12,500km from London to Lagos to raise funds for polio eradication.
Pakistan's North Waziristan district authorities have launched an aggressive vaccination drive after a polio case surfaced after 15 polio-free months in the country.
The disease was detected in a 15-month-old toddler about 15 kilometers away from the Afghanistan border. This area was considered a Taliban militant’s hub until 2014.
One polio case is one too many, global health experts say.
And when Malawi announced in February this year that it had detected a polio case in the country’s capital Lilongwe, the alarm was significant, and the response from both the government and global health partners was swift, if not frantic.
In the outskirts of Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, just beyond where paved roads transition to dirt, an undiagnosed polio infection paralysed a three-year-old girl. From one day to the next, the child’s life was changed forever.
Dr. Rana Muhammad Safdar, the coordinator for Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication, has sleepless nights thinking about what needs to be done for his country to eradicate polio.
In a “historic achievement for humanity”, two of three wild poliovirus strains have been eliminated worldwide, the World Health Organization
(WHO) announced on Thursday, following the conclusion by a group of experts that WPV3, type three of the disease, has been eradicated completely.
For a long time, no person in Kenya suffered the devastating disability that is caused by polio. In fact, the only reminder in the early 2000s was the victims in the streets of Nairobi, many of whom had been paralyzed as children and adults. Their lives were ravaged by this terrible, vaccine-preventable disease.
Childhood immunisation is one of the safest and most cost-effective health interventions available, yet many of the world's most vulnerable children continue to miss out.
A World Health Organisation report entitled
State of inequality: childhood immunisation was released last week. While the report is mostly good news, immunisation rates are up and many countries have eradicated diseases entirely, a large population of children remain unimmunised.
While long-awaited new vaccines for malaria and dengue may finally be within reach, many of the world’s existing vaccines have remained unreachable for many of the people who need them most.
The goal is an ambitious one – to deliver a polio-free world by 2018. Towards this end, the multi-sector Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is bringing out the big guns, sparing no expense to ensure that “every last child” is immunised against the crippling disease.
The Taliban are proving to be a huge stumbling block for Pakistan as the South Asian nation - one of only three remaining polio endemic countries in the world – tries to fight the crippling disease.
Africa and Pakistan are now battling outbreaks of polio, threatening the extraordinary progress the world has made in fighting the almost-extinct disease. In the Horn of Africa, there are now 121 reported polio cases. Last year, there were 223 worldwide.
Siddharth Chatterjee has served as the chief diplomat, head of strategic partnerships and international relations at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the world’s largest humanitarian network, since June 2011.
Four-year-old Muhammad Jihad is handicapped, and his parents know who to blame: the Taliban.
The Ukraine is facing a “real threat” of a return of polio as well as outbreaks of other serious diseases such as mumps, rubella and measles because of a combination of state inefficiency and public mistrust of vaccinations, health experts have said.
Akbar Shah was sitting with his sick wife in the gynaecology ward of the Agency Headquarters Hospital in Bajaur Agency, a division of northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), when a bomb ripped through the facility, scattering patients, doctors and medical supplies.
A U.S.-based civil society coalition is calling on Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to keep spending on global health aid at current levels, warning that recent budget cuts risk a dangerous backslide in health and development gains achieved over the past three decades.
The murder of nine health workers vaccinating children against polio in Pakistan’s northwest cities of Peshawar and Charsadda in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, and its southern port city Karachi, have elicited shock and outrage.
It was early July 2004, and Darfur was looking like a war zone - massive human displacements of an
estimated one million people, ongoing skirmishes, inclement weather, a parched landscape due to the recurring droughts, and sheer misery everywhere.
Over thirty thousand children in the remote Tirah area of the Khyber Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Northern Pakistan, have waited four years for protection from polio, a viral disease that is sometimes referred to as ‘infantile paralysis’ due to its crippling effects on children.
Twelve-year-old Sunday Oderinde sits by the side of the road with both legs folded under him and watches his friends play a game of soccer on the streets of Iwaya, a suburb in Lagos, Nigeria. It is a game that he would love to join in but cannot.
Pakistan’s efforts to contain polio in areas bordering Afghanistan may have received a setback following the conviction of a doctor who allegedly ran a fake vaccine programme to locate Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.