Pakistan Today 28 May 2012 http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/?p=188566
by Rabia Ahmed
by Rabia Ahmed
The biggest enemy of the Muslim world lurks within the fold, the mullah cabal that rules the hearts and minds of the poor and the illiterate, and nowhere more so than in this luckless land of the pure. One of the biggest crimes they will have to answer for is their relentless campaign against the vaccination of children against polio.
Polio, one of the most dreaded diseases this century, is caused by a virus only rarely contracted by adults but causing crippling lifelong disability in children. Those who contract it are moreover susceptible to a debilitating Post Polio Syndrome in later life.
There were no known means of preventing polio until the discovery of the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Since its introduction in 1955, the polio vaccine, administered orally to children, has helped to eradicate polio from the United States, a country where alone in the 1940s 35,000 people were disabled by this disease every year. Since then the World Health Organisation has reported an almost 99 percent decrease in reported cases between 1988 and 2010 all over the world, a result of concerted effort by the governments of the world to vaccinate children in their countries. It is no coincidence that the three countries that are an exception to this success story belong to the Muslim bloc: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. In these three countries polio remains endemic.
Religious leaders (with surprising exceptions such as Jamiat e Ulema e Islam Maulana Sami ul Haq) in all three countries have used their sermons to propagate the view that the oral drops are an American ploy to depopulate the Muslim world, since, (they say), these drops induce sterilisation. They also claim that the drug used is contaminated with pig fat and is therefore haram.
Nigeria, once close to its targets in the eradication campaign has recently seen a resurgence of polio while Pakistan and Afghanistan have always remained far from their goal. And now, giving credence to this propaganda is the campaign by Dr Shakil Afridi, him of the CIA backed fake polio campaign fame, some say it was a Hepatitis C vaccine…the end result is the same.
Honestly, I don’t know if I care as much about Osama eradication as I do about the eradication of the polio virus, maybe because I have seen what it does to people at close hand. I’m glad Osama is gone, but like a shark’s teeth his place will be taken by another, and another…and then another until we eradicate the whole mind set, and nothing at all has been done about that as yet. But every child vaccinated is another child saved and by putting that process in jeopardy is where Dr Afridi betrayed his country. Call it treason, call it treachery, it works the same way whichever way you look at it.
The Americans are looking at the matter from a single view point, their own, an angle from which they are prone to view most issues, as perhaps we all are. But sitting here in this chair in front of a computer in Lahore, Pakistan, the prospect of trusted public health professionals running fake campaigns and dancing to the tune of foreign intelligence agencies is none too appealing. I don’t care who they are attempting to shoot down, such insidious workings cannot be conducive to public health in any country anywhere.
A public official should be answerable to a single authority in temporal terms, the one of the country whose passport he/she holds which must be of the country where he/she holds public office. In simple terms (with what must appear to be a sudden change of subject right at the end of this column), this means that public officials must not owe allegiance to any country other than their own. In other words, public officials must not hold dual nationality. But this is not a sudden change of subject. It pinpoints what is so irksome (to put it mildly) in the Afridi case, the fact that the doctor was working for a foreign agency all the while he pretended to be working for his own, an agency belonging to his other country of allegiance, one moreover whose agenda in this case happened to be detrimental to his country of employment, and I am not speaking of the capture of militants, however much carnage they may have caused in this world, in or out of New York.
With due respect, Ms Clinton, there are harmful things out there other than Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Because of your country’s obsession with both it is possible that the bulk of the polio cases in the foreseeable future may be from Pakistan. More collateral damage?
There were no known means of preventing polio until the discovery of the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Since its introduction in 1955, the polio vaccine, administered orally to children, has helped to eradicate polio from the United States, a country where alone in the 1940s 35,000 people were disabled by this disease every year. Since then the World Health Organisation has reported an almost 99 percent decrease in reported cases between 1988 and 2010 all over the world, a result of concerted effort by the governments of the world to vaccinate children in their countries. It is no coincidence that the three countries that are an exception to this success story belong to the Muslim bloc: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. In these three countries polio remains endemic.Religious leaders (with surprising exceptions such as Jamiat e Ulema e Islam Maulana Sami ul Haq) in all three countries have used their sermons to propagate the view that the oral drops are an American ploy to depopulate the Muslim world, since, (they say), these drops induce sterilisation. They also claim that the drug used is contaminated with pig fat and is therefore haram.
Nigeria, once close to its targets in the eradication campaign has recently seen a resurgence of polio while Pakistan and Afghanistan have always remained far from their goal. And now, giving credence to this propaganda is the campaign by Dr Shakil Afridi, him of the CIA backed fake polio campaign fame, some say it was a Hepatitis C vaccine…the end result is the same.
Honestly, I don’t know if I care as much about Osama eradication as I do about the eradication of the polio virus, maybe because I have seen what it does to people at close hand. I’m glad Osama is gone, but like a shark’s teeth his place will be taken by another, and another…and then another until we eradicate the whole mind set, and nothing at all has been done about that as yet. But every child vaccinated is another child saved and by putting that process in jeopardy is where Dr Afridi betrayed his country. Call it treason, call it treachery, it works the same way whichever way you look at it.
The Americans are looking at the matter from a single view point, their own, an angle from which they are prone to view most issues, as perhaps we all are. But sitting here in this chair in front of a computer in Lahore, Pakistan, the prospect of trusted public health professionals running fake campaigns and dancing to the tune of foreign intelligence agencies is none too appealing. I don’t care who they are attempting to shoot down, such insidious workings cannot be conducive to public health in any country anywhere.
A public official should be answerable to a single authority in temporal terms, the one of the country whose passport he/she holds which must be of the country where he/she holds public office. In simple terms (with what must appear to be a sudden change of subject right at the end of this column), this means that public officials must not owe allegiance to any country other than their own. In other words, public officials must not hold dual nationality. But this is not a sudden change of subject. It pinpoints what is so irksome (to put it mildly) in the Afridi case, the fact that the doctor was working for a foreign agency all the while he pretended to be working for his own, an agency belonging to his other country of allegiance, one moreover whose agenda in this case happened to be detrimental to his country of employment, and I am not speaking of the capture of militants, however much carnage they may have caused in this world, in or out of New York.
With due respect, Ms Clinton, there are harmful things out there other than Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Because of your country’s obsession with both it is possible that the bulk of the polio cases in the foreseeable future may be from Pakistan. More collateral damage?
No comments:
Post a Comment
If you have any comments, please leave them here. They will be published after moderation. Automated comments will be deleted.To contact me please leave a comment. If you do not wish that comment to be published please say so within the message. Thank you.