IndoCarib
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HONG KONG India and Pakistan compete often angrily, and usually at full volume in just about everything. Cricket. Nuclear weapons. They dispute a marshy creek that runs between their two countries. And they spend fortunes to bivouac military units on a glacier so high, cold and forbidding that it is sometimes called the third pole. That standoff at 22,000 feet has famously been likened to a struggle of two bald men over a comb.
Another Indo-Pak competition is the fight against polio, and India is the hands-down winner. No new cases have been reported in India in more than a year, while Pakistan remains by far the most-afflicted country, with about a third of all cases worldwide last year.
Polio should have been gone by now the crippling disease is fully preventable with a few drops of inexpensive oral vaccine and public health experts expected it to have been wiped out a dozen years ago. It almost seems to be a disease from a distant era, like smallpox or bubonic plague.
But Taliban hard-liners have kept vaccination teams from reaching a quarter-million vulnerable Pakistani children under 5. In recent weeks gunmen in Karachi attacked a United Nations doctor and his vaccination team, and saboteurs have harassed teachers and health care workers.
New polio cases are the lowest theyve ever been and there are currently just three countries, down from 125 in 1988, where polio is still endemic: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, said Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who has made global polio eradication a focus of the philanthropic foundation that he established with his wife.
India has defeated polio and Angola has defeated it twice, Mr. Gates said on Tuesday. We have never been this close.
India Wins (While Pakistan Keeps Losing) in Fight Against Polio - NYTimes.com
Another Indo-Pak competition is the fight against polio, and India is the hands-down winner. No new cases have been reported in India in more than a year, while Pakistan remains by far the most-afflicted country, with about a third of all cases worldwide last year.
Polio should have been gone by now the crippling disease is fully preventable with a few drops of inexpensive oral vaccine and public health experts expected it to have been wiped out a dozen years ago. It almost seems to be a disease from a distant era, like smallpox or bubonic plague.
But Taliban hard-liners have kept vaccination teams from reaching a quarter-million vulnerable Pakistani children under 5. In recent weeks gunmen in Karachi attacked a United Nations doctor and his vaccination team, and saboteurs have harassed teachers and health care workers.
New polio cases are the lowest theyve ever been and there are currently just three countries, down from 125 in 1988, where polio is still endemic: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, said Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who has made global polio eradication a focus of the philanthropic foundation that he established with his wife.
India has defeated polio and Angola has defeated it twice, Mr. Gates said on Tuesday. We have never been this close.
India Wins (While Pakistan Keeps Losing) in Fight Against Polio - NYTimes.com
