This time from The Lancet medical journal. Story from Bloomberg News via Canada’s National Post:
Polio, the crippling virus driven to the brink of extinction, may return to Europe as regional conflicts undermine a US$10-billion eradication campaign.
Polio’s re-appearance in Syria last month after a 14 year absence raises the risk that the virus will hitch a ride on unsuspecting refugees fleeing the country and return to areas, including Europe, that have been polio-free for decades, according to a letter published in the The Lancet medical journal Friday.
“Polio is making a comeback,” Martin Eichner, a professor at the University of Tuebingen who co-authored the letter to The Lancet, said Friday. Eichner and a German colleague warned that the vaccine used in the U.S. and Europe offers only partial protection against infection and called for heightened screening of sewage systems near refugee settlements in Turkey and Jordan. Syrian war refugees, moreover, have begun arriving in Western Europe, including Sweden and Germany.
Syria isn’t the only area where poliomyelitis, as the disease is formally known, is rearing its head. It has resurfaced in the Horn of Africa as well as in sewage samples in Israel and Egypt.
Muslim extremists killing vaccinators in Pakistan!
Genetic analysis suggests the virus responsible for the cases in Syria is the same as the one found in Israel and Egypt, and came from Pakistan.
[….]
Twenty-two vaccinators have been murdered in Pakistan since December, and militants in North Waziristan have banned vaccination in the area, he said.
The photo is from this story about Pakistan health workers murdered by Muslim fanatics.