WHO: polio worker shot, killed in Pakistan

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

WHO: polio worker shot, killed in Pakistan

AP foreign, Saturday July 21 2012

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. health agency says a local community worker who helped an anti-polio campaign in Pakistan has been shot and killed in Karachi — days after two of its staff were injured in a shooting in the city.

The World Health Organization said Muhammad Ishaq was killed on Friday evening. In a statement Saturday, it did not specify any suspected motive.

Immunization activities in Pakistan's biggest city were suspended this week after the previous incident.

Pakistan — one of only three countries where the disease is endemic — is in the middle of a campaign to vaccinate children under five. Taliban militants in northern Pakistan have barred the vaccination campaign from territory under their control, saying it can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10347162

[Enrique]

1. story leaves out relevant information

our brilliant CIA messed with this critical immunization program as part of our terror war.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/good-job-cia-your-pakistan-vaccine-plot-helped-bring-polio-back-from-the-brink-of-eradication/260059/

Last year the CIA deployed a Pakistani physician to execute a phony hepatitis vaccine campaign in Abbottabad, hoping to extract blood samples from the children living inside a compound, thought to house Osama bin Laden and his family. Because of the vaccine deception, multiple imams and Taliban leaders have declared that vaccines are CIA plots. The ruse may also be responsible for what appears to have been an assassination attempt against a World Health Organization immunization convoy that injured two people on July 17.

After the bin Laden incident, Dr. Orin Levine, a key figure in global vaccine efforts, and I wrote in the Washington Post that the CIA's plot "burned bridges that took years for health workers to build." Our concerns were dismissed last summer by the Obama administration, with unnamed spokespersons for the CIA insisting that ridding the world of the al-Qaeda leader was more than worth whatever "minor problems" might be experienced in vaccination efforts.

Since then, the "minor problems" have mounted steadily, and it is possible polio eradication will now worsen general civil unrest and anti-government sentiments across the country. Shortly after Pakistan started its National Immunization Days, featuring nationwide vaccination for polio, measles, and other childhood infectious diseases, this week polio workers were beaten publicly by mobs in Islamabad. In addition, another polio eradication team was fired upon in the southern town of Jacobabad and the Taliban has banned all immunizers from entering the northwestern region of the country, forbidding the vaccination of nearly 300,000 children.

(...)

Some people said that a small amount of suspicion of vaccines from the CIA activities a year ago was merely collateral damage in the "war on terrorism." Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States and its allies have over the last 15 years killed about 5,000 people. Today that collateral damage could mean that many children in Pakistan are at risk of dying or being permanently paralyzed by polio, and the reversal of eradication efforts that could swiftly spawn outbreaks across the entire region.