Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

African Scientist: African Corruption Made Ebola Worse

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Daliborlev (CC), FLickr

Daliborlev (CC), Flickr

Since last week, there has been some good news on the Ebola front: a suggestion that the epidemic in Liberia is beginning to slow down, with fewer new cases reported. At the same time, there is a new outbreak in Sierra Leone, in a part of the country that thought it had beaten the disease and then self-quarantined to keep it at bay. So it is probably too soon to hope that the entire international outbreak is on its way to being extinguished.

At the same time, two major international medical meetings happening this week have allowed researchers to discuss the newest reports from  the field — but not with equal success. The annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the largest medical society devoted to diseases such as Ebola, lost a significant number of attendees when the conference’s host state, Louisiana, threatened to forcibly quarantine anyone traveling from a country experiencing Ebola, whether or not that person had been exposed. Meanwhile, Vienna, Austria had no such qualms, and so the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance proceeded without any difficulties, allowing physicians and epidemiologists fresh from the Ebola zone to share reports.

It’s from that second meeting that this week’s news comes. Oyewale Tomori, president of the Nigerian Academy of Science and a leader of the World Health Organization’s Ebola response in 1995, used the IMED podium to deliver a stinging critique of the behavior of African governments during the current crisis, charging that internal corruption has crippled the continent’s ability to fight its own disease battles.

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Update: Pakistan, Polio, Fake Vaccines And The CIA

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Regular readers will remember my outraged rant post from almost a year ago, reacting to the news that the Central Intelligence Agency faked a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a way of getting close to Osama Bin Laden’s hide-out, hoping to prove his presence by using a vaccine needle to grab a sample of DNA.

I felt, and still feel, that the maneuver — which was belatedly acknowledged by the CIA — was a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations. I especially felt it endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children — an accusation that seems fantastic, but begins to make sense when you realize some of those areas have perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns.

I take no pleasure in saying the prediction came true. [Read more…]

Borders are Irrelevant: Polio Returns to China

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Very bad news from China, as reported by Xinhua and confirmed by the World Health Organization: For the first time in 12 years, polio paralysis has surfaced in China. Four children, the oldest 2 years old, were diagnosed with polio in mid-July. They all live in Hotan prefecture in Xinjiang province (by weird coincidence, also the site of the latest Chinese food-safety scandal).

The generally accepted math, in polio detection, is that one verified case of polio paralysis represents up to 200 cases of silent infection. Those 200 undetected cases may not experience symptoms, but they can pass on the disease to others. As a result, one case of polio in an area that has been considered polio-free is an emergency. Four cases, as you can imagine, is much worse. [Read more…]

How a U.S. Court Case Explains Problems Eradicating Polio

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One of the perennial problems blocking polio eradication is the persistent belief that the rounds of vaccination meant to protect children are actually a covert campaign to harm them. I’ve seen it myself, in my reporting, and studies examining the 23-year effort’s inability to get to zero describe it as well.

From the sanitized safety of the industrialized world, it’s hard to imagine how any neighborhood or tribe could hold such views. Which is why the report on Friday of news regarding a 15-year-old court case is so important. The actions that prompted the case created mistrust so long-lasting that it undermines unrelated medical campaigns, including polio, today.

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Is Polio Eradication Slipping Out of Reach?

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Over the weekend, I sat in an airport in the midwestern United States for a 12-hour stretch, trying to get a standby seat. Time after time, the goal was in sight — the customer service agents and the video screen hanging from the ceiling all told me I was No. 1 on the waitlist — but every time a flight opened up to boarding, a few higher-priority customers popped up at the last minute and slid onto the list in front of me. The possibility of my getting a seat dangled just out of reach: never impossible, but despite the exhausting wait, never quite achieved.

I suspect this is what polio eradication feels like.

The long effort to wipe the paralyzing disease from the planet, begun in 1988 by a coalition of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, UNICEF and the service organization Rotary International (recently joined by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), has several times missed its goal of interrupting all transmission of wild virus — first in 2000, then in 2002 and then again in 2005. The hoped-for date has been moved again, to the end of 2012 this time.

But last week, an independent assessment bluntly warned that the international effort “is not on track to interrupt polio transmission as it planned to do by the end of 2012” and likely will miss that goal as well.

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