It has become one of the characteristics of the times, that agencies and people would grow very passionate on certain issues that catch their fancy while displaying obscene indifference to other similar or even weightier issues not on their agenda.
For instance while the government of Nigeria mobilizes enormous resources (made available by Bill Gates) to deal with the 26 (THAT IS TWENTY-SIX) incidences of polio in Nigeria in the current year, they shrug at the THOUSANDS that DIE annually from each of basic diseases as dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, etc.
Worse still is the fact of hundreds of thousands of annual deaths arising from moral issues as abortion, homosexuality, overly-romanticed promotion of condoms, mockery of the marriage institution, etc all promoted by the same Mr Bill Gates and associates!
The situation becomes truly pathetic, when we consider further that a significant number of children are guaranteed to contact wild polio virus from the very vaccine they are given. Figures of risk of a normal child contacting polio strictly from the oral vaccine itself range from 1 per 750,000 (www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/a-look-at-each-vaccine/polio-vaccine.html), 1 per million (www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-14-nigeria-polio_N.htm), or 1 per 2.4 million (www.babycenter.com/0_the-polio-vaccine_1566.bc). All these figures are cited by strongly pro-vaccine lobbies. If we take the most conservative of the figures, and considering the millions of children involved, say 50 million, then the expected number of cases of polio in the country, arising purely as a result of the vaccine programme would be 21 cases! Yet, many children are repeatedly vaccinated over and over again - at school, market, church, mosque, etc! (The issue of thimerosal – 49.55% mercury - used as preservative for vaccines sent to third world countries, and administered to young infants is a subject for another time.)
And it is not that these figures are unknown both to the sponsoring bodies and the recipient Nigerian officials. According to a news item in USA today, “In 2007, health experts reported that amid Nigeria's ongoing outbreak of wild polio viruses, 69 children had also been paralyzed in a new outbreak caused by the mutation of a vaccine's virus.” The report continued, “Back then, WHO said the vaccine-linked outbreak would be swiftly overcome — yet two years later, cases continue to mount. They have since identified polio cases linked to the vaccine dating back as far as 2005.” (www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-14-nigeria-polio_N.htm). Reflecting on this situation in Nigeria, the man who heads the polio department at the World Health Organization, Dr Bruce Aylward, was reported to have said, "It's very disturbing."
In 2009, according to the usatoday, “the number of polio cases caused by the vaccine” (between January and August, when the report was released) was 124 children “out of about 42 million children vaccinated.” The report further noted that “For every case of paralysis, there are hundreds of other children who don't develop symptoms, but pass on the disease.”
Concluding, the article observed that “Nigeria's vaccine-linked outbreak underlines the need to stop using the oral polio vaccine as soon as possible, since it can create the very epidemics it was designed to stop, experts say. WHO is researching other vaccines that might work better, but none is on the horizon.” http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-14-nigeria-polio_N.htm
So again we ask the question that our egg-heads and technocrats in charge of oral polio vaccine programme seem unable to ask once Mr Gates comes on his perennial visits: Why is all this obsession about zero-polio when the very same children being saved from polio (if at all that is correct) are only being reserved for malnutrition, malaria or common dysentery?
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