Free Republic

KONAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan, Jan. 27, 2009 – An extensive vaccination drive targeting polio started earlier this month thanks to the efforts of the provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan’s Konar province and government officials from the province. Gov. Sayeed Wahidi of Afghanistan’s Konar province administers the oral polio vaccine to an Afghan girl, Jan. 11, 2009. U.S. Navy photo by Lt. j.g. James Dietle  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Though polio vaccinations are common and successful in established nations, Konar’s developing health services, road quality and regional conflicts have created challenges for administering the vaccine, officials said. "The PRT...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A leading pro-life group that monitors the use of fetal cells from abortions in vaccinations is warning doctors and patients about a new polio vaccine. Children of God for Life is calling on both to "just say no" to the newly-licensed vaccine Pentacel made by Sanofi Pasteur. On June 26, the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended the vaccine as part of the immunization schedule for children. That's despite the fact that vaccines that were not derived with the controversial fetal cells have been on the market and in use for years. "We find it...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old. Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family's residence near Jackson. Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff's Department...

A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old. Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family's residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said. "We did everything...

From what I know of history, I know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not like to be photgraphed sitting in his wheelchair. So when I saw this photo of Bill Clinton unveiling a statue of FDR at the San Juan, Puerto Rico Capitol Building on 4/7/08, I went to work. I contacted the FDR Library, and asked them the following qeustion: "On Monday, April 7, 2008, Bill Clinton unveiled a statue of FDR at the Capitol Building in San Juan, Puerto Rico. From what I recall, FDR went through great lengths and was always trying his hardest not to...

Ok, this is the first I've heard of this---maybe I just don't read "Scientific American" enough---but Sundance Channel had a "documentary" called "The Origin of AIDs." Before you flame, I know all about Sundance, which is why I'm asking for evidence and sources! The program, researching a book by Michael Hooper (a journalist, not a doctor), claims that AIDs was an accidental human creation that resulted from using chimpanzee tissue as a culture in African labs by a U.S. researcher named Koprowski who was trying to beat Sabin to an oral polio vaccing. There was a conference on Hooper's book,...

LONDON - A polio outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the vaccine designed to stop it, international health officials say, leaving at least 69 children paralyzed. It is a frightening paradox in a part of the world that already distrusts western vaccines, making it even tougher to stamp out age-old diseases. The outbreak was caused by the live polio virus that is used in vaccines given orally — the preferred method in developing countries because it is cheaper and doesn't require medical training to dispense.

A polio outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the vaccine designed to stop it, international health officials say, leaving at least 69 children paralyzed. It is a frightening paradox in a part of the world that already distrusts western vaccines, making it even tougher to stamp out age-old diseases. The outbreak was caused by the live polio virus that is used in vaccines given orally — the preferred method in developing countries because it is cheaper and doesn't require medical training to dispense. "This vaccine is the most effective tool we have against the virus, but it's like fighting fire...

In Pakistan, thousands of parents refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations to their children last month, mostly due to rumors that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilize innocent Muslim children. The disinformation -- spread by clerics using mosque loudspeakers -- has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan. The scaremongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003, where the disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months. Pakistan is one of just four countries where polio remains endemic. The...

Islamist militants claim vaccines are US plot By Isambard Wilkinson in Peshawar Last Updated: 2:10am GMT 17/02/2007 A doctor was killed by a roadside bomb in Pakistan today as Islamist militants tried to halt a polio immunisation campaign which, they say, is an American plot to sterilise Muslims. Dr. Abdul Ghani was killed and three guards wounded after he visited a mullah, or religious leader, in Salarzai, a village in Bajaur tribal region in the borderlands with Afghanistan. "It was a remote-controlled bomb," said an intelligence official in Khar, Bajaur's main town. No one claimed responsibility for the attack. Dr...

(CP) - The new head of the World Health Organization took office Thursday, urging the world to remain vigilant against the threat of H5N1 avian influenza and warning that complacency endangers efforts to prepare for the next influenza pandemic. Dr. Margaret Chan also said WHO will review its polio eradication strategy with scientists, financial donors and affected countries in coming months to try to determine how to finally complete the 18-year-old campaign to drive the polio virus out of humankind worldwide. "We need to have a balanced view," Chan said of the threat that H5N1 might trigger a flu pandemic....

By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes human AIDS. Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus existed among these apes in the wild. It does, the team...

Almost two centuries ago, a small band of national patriots joined Texans to launch a battle for freedom and sent a unifying rallying cry through out our nation "Remember The Alamo!" Our nation is being threatened by a new Alamo, and the army is between 12 million and 20 million strong. The army is one that is creeping, walking, swimming and being driven in shadowy caravans across our nation's state borders. Instead of being armed with weapons of violence, this army is simply overwhelming American health care, education, and justice systems by refusing to enter our country legally. But the...

When dinosaurs roam the earth, these days, they often do it in wheelchairs. Just ask self-styled poliomyelitis-saurs Sherry Flansburg and Joan Bruhn, polio survivors whose increasingly weakened muscles, symptoms of Post Polio Syndrome, have forced them into wheelchairs recently, decades after contracting polio. Flansburg first heard she was a dinosaur about 20 years ago, around the time PPS began to be recognized in the medical community. "I had a very good doctor tell me that if you need something, Sherry, you let me know and we'll talk about it because you're a dinosaur, and they don't teach us how to...

A fast-moving and deadly outbreak of polio has erupted in Namibia, in southern Africa. The country had been free of polio for a decade. The outbreak is unrelated to the one that began spreading from Nigeria in 2004 through several countries in central Africa and the Arabian peninsula, and is unusual in that it is striking mostly adults, according to the World Health Organization. Most children in Namibia have been vaccinated, but most adults have not. The disease has killed 7 Namibians and paralyzed 33 more, driving panicked citizens to swarm hospitals seeking immunization. But because there was very little...

New outbreak as polio refuses to go quietly 17:44 07 June 2006 NewScientist.com news service Linda Geddes Namibia is suffering its first polio outbreak in more than a decade, setting back hopes that the disease might be eradicated from the world by the end of 2006. Three human cases of wild polio virus have been confirmed in Namibia so far, while a further 33 cases - including six deaths - are currently being investigated, say officials from the World Health Organization. The last recorded case of the disease in the country was in 1996. The Namibian outbreak is the latest...

Polio Vaccine Declared Safe and Effective (1955) Jonas Salk was the American physician who developed the polio vaccine. It was first tested on monkeys and then on patients at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children. In 1952, Salk tested the vaccine on volunteering parties, including himself, his laboratory staff, his wife, and his children. In 1954, national testing began on one million children, aged 6 to 9, who became known as the Polio Pioneers. On April 12, 1955, the vaccine was declared safe and effective. How does the vaccine work?

BAREILLY, India — The cry went up the moment the polio vaccination team was spotted — "Hide your children!" Some families slammed doors on the two volunteers going house to house with polio drops in this teeming city's decrepit maze of lanes, saying that they feared the vaccine would sicken or sterilize their children, or simply that they were fed up with the long drive to eradicate polio. "We have a lot of other problems, and you don't care about those," shouted one woman from behind a locked door. "All you have is drops. My children get other diseases, and...

There was a post I saw yesterday concerning a man married to someone with polio for over 50 years. How he stayed with her constantly. Does anyone know the title or have a thread to the post? It would be most appreciated. I tried searching using polio and iron lung but could not find it. I thank you in advance for any assistance.

LONG PRAIRIE, Minn. - Polio was pronounced dead in the Western Hemisphere years ago, after one of the most successful public health campaigns in history. But now it is stealing through a tiny Amish community here in central Minnesota, spreading from an 8-month-old girl to four children on two neighboring farms. So far, no one has been crippled by the disease; only 1 in 200 cases of polio results in paralysis. But worried public health officials say it may be only a matter of time. The story of how polio came to this dairy farming community of 24 families, with...

Associated Press ST. PAUL, Minn. — Four children in an Amish community in Minnesota have contracted the polio virus — the first known infections in the U.S. in five years, state health officials said yesterday. Dr. Harry Hull, the state epidemiologist, said the cases do not pose a threat to the general public because most people have been vaccinated against polio and are unlikely to have contact with Amish people. But he said he expects to find more infections within the Amish community because some of its members refuse immunizations on religious grounds. None of the children have shown any...

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Dr. Harry Hull, the state epidemiologist, said the cases do not pose a threat to the general public because most people have been vaccinated against polio (search) and are unlikely to have contact with Amish people. But he said he expects to find more infections within the Amish community because some of its members refuse immunizations on religious grounds. None of the children have shown any symptoms of the paralyzing disease. About one in 200 people who contract the polio virus suffer paralysis because of it; others typically rid themselves the virus after weeks or months....

Two Democratic Governors, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Janet Napolitano of Arizona, have declared a state of emergency and asked for federal help to deal with the costs of the violence and property damage caused by illegal aliens coming over their southern borders. If President Bush lets these partisan Democrats get to the right of him on the immigration issue, all Republicans will suffer in the next election. Dr. Madeleine Cosman, Esq. is a national authority on the diseases brought into our country by illegal aliens, who of course are not given health examinations required of all legal immigrants....

A decade ago, polio had been virtually eradicated in most developing nations, including Muslim countries. In 2001, it reached an all-time low, with only 483 cases reported worldwide.In the past two years, the virus has begun to spread again. So far this year, 1,004 new cases have been reported globally...Troubling aspects of the resurgence are its concentration in the Muslim world and the poor response by wealthy Islamic governments to help. Of the $4 billion spent to eradicate polio since 1988, only $3.5 million -- less than 1 percent -- has come from members of the Organization of the Islamic...

Saudi Arabia, which gets millions of visitors each year making their pilgrimage to Mecca, has ordered all young visitors from countries with polio cases to bring proof of vaccination and will vaccinate them again when they arrive, the World Health Organization announced yesterday. In issuing the order, which applies to everyone under age 15 from 19 countries, the kingdom is moving to stem the global spread of the polio virus, which now affects mainly Muslim countries and regions. Although the next pilgrimage, or hajj, will not reach its peak until early January, the order will take effect as soon as...

"Americans should be told that diseases long eradicated in this country — tuberculosis, leprosy, polio, for example — and other extremely contagious diseases have been linked directly to" illegal immigrants, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) told the Business Journal of Phoenix last month.

The disappearance of an American teenager in Aruba has been more than a tragedy for her and for her family. It is the latest of many tragedies to strike trusting people who have long been sheltered from dangers and who have acted as if there were no dangers. Not only individuals but whole nations have lost their sense of danger after having been protected from those dangers. After the devastating disease of polio was finally conquered by vaccines, back in the 1960s, the number of people afflicted declined almost to the vanishing point. Some people then began to see...

An outbreak of polio in Yemen has risen to 63 cases, making it one of the worst epidemics in the world, the UN health agency said. The number of cases in Yemen will probably soon exceed 100, as many more suspected cases are being investigated, said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation's polio eradication campaign. "They are having a pretty big epidemic there," Rosenbauer said. "But we should be able to stop the virus relatively quickly." Meanwhile, in Indonesia, which like Yemen was thought to be polio-free, two more cases have been confirmed, the WHO said. Indonesia,...

GENEVA - The U.N. health agency on Saturday urged wealthy Islamic countries to contribute more to the global campaign to eradicate polio, warning that lack of funds could endanger efforts to wipe out the crippling disease by the end of this year. The World Health Organization campaign to fight polio has cost $4 billion so far, but states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have contributed just $3 million, even though recent outbreaks of polio have occurred mostly in Islamic countries, said spokeswoman Linda Muller. "The time to act is now, we can't afford to wait," Muller told The...

Nearly two years after radical Islamic preachers told parents to refuse to have their children vaccinated against polio for fear it was part of a U.S. plot against Muslims, the repercussions are still being felt: A Nigerian strain of the virus that causes the crippling disease has cropped up as far away as Indonesia. The U.N. health agency says the world still has a chance to meet a deadline to stamp out polio by year's end, but other experts are pessimistic. In Kano, northern Nigeria's largest city, many residents still refuse to have their children vaccinated, not just against polio...

A case of polio has been detected in Indonesia, World Health Organization officials said yesterday, indicating that an outbreak spreading from northern Nigeria since 2003 has crossed an ocean and reached the world's fourth most populous country. The virus, found in a village on the island of Java, is most closely related to a strain that was found in Saudi Arabia in December, the officials said. The most likely explanations of how it got there are that it either was brought back by an Indonesian working in Saudi Arabia or by a pilgrim who went to Mecca in January. Indonesia's...

For years the March of Dimes (MOD) has been boycotted by pro-life groups for its involvement in the abortion industry. Unfortunately, many well-meaning pro-life citizens continue to support MOD, not knowing one of the group's methods of preventing what it calls "Birth Defects" is to promote abortion.MOD was one of the major forces behind the development and widespread use of amniocentesis in the second trimester of pregnancy. Amniocentesis is a test commonly used to determine if an unborn child has a congenital abnormality, knowledge of which can facilitate the decision to abort "defective" children. Pat Robertson of CBN and the...

Polio has broken out in Yemen and may have been imported by pilgrims returning from Mecca, international health officials said yesterday. The disease appeared to have been on the verge of eradication in early 2004, but has since spread to several countries across Africa and Saudi Arabia. Four children paralyzed by polio have been found in Yemen, which is tucked into a corner of the Arabian peninsula, and shares a long, porous border with Saudi Arabia. In response, the Yemeni government and the World Health Organization are planning immunization drives for May and July in an effort to get drops...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Mitch McConnell's first memory is of buying a pair of shoes at a Georgia shop, shortly after being told that he would be able to walk after all. Marking the 50th anniversary of the government's approval of a vaccine for polio, McConnell took time on the Senate floor Tuesday to describe being struck by the disease when he was 2 years old. Though he was better off than many victims of polio, which can cause severe muscle damage, paralysis and death, the Kentucky Republican said the quadriceps muscle of his left leg was affected. With his...

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Salk polio vaccine. Poliomyelitis, also know as infantile paralysis, used to be one of childhood's most feared diseases. A few years after Dr. Jonas Salk announced his vaccine on April 12, 1955, nearly every child in the U.S. was protected. Today polio has disappeared from the Americas, Europe and the Western Pacific.... A too-little known part of this feat is the role played by Rotary, the international businessman's club, which 20 years ago adopted the goal of wiping out the disease. Rotary understood that medical breakthroughs are worthless unless people aren't afraid to...

Reliant on an antiquated machine to breathe, and live, polio sufferer Marilyn Rogers and her iron lung are icons of one of the most frightening times in America's public health system. But she has no regrets. Marilyn Rogers was destined to dance. The girl with reddish-blond curls used her muscular legs and gift for graceful moves to dance her way into winning a scholarship from the MacPhail music school. But at 9 years old, the child who couldn't sit still for more than a few seconds developed the early symptoms of polio, the notorious paralyzing disease that was sweeping the...

GENEVA (Agence France-Presse) -- At least three cases of polio have been imported into Saudi Arabia since September, the United Nations' health agency said yesterday, highlighting the risk of the disease spreading from West Africa with pilgrims to Mecca. The latest case involved a Nigerian boy who had been living near Mecca for the past two years, who fell ill in mid-December after the family hosted visitors from Nigeria, the World Health Organization said.

The Washington press corps is beside itself because President Bush will celebrate his second inauguration with $40 million worth of festivities - at a time when the nation is at war and the tragedy of the tsunami disaster is still fresh. Instead, they say, Bush should do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did for his third inauguration on the eve of World War II, and pull the plug on all the ostentatious presidential partying. There's a reason, however, that the press cites Roosevelt's 1941 inauguration instead of, say, his first in 1933 - which was the Great Depression's worst year. That's...

Polio has spread to two more African countries that had been freed of the crippling disease, threatening to become a major epidemic across West and Central Africa, the World Health Organization said yesterday. The disease begins reaching its high season next month. The spread of polio to Guinea and Mali brings to 12 the number of previously polio-free African countries that have experienced an outbreak of the disease since January 2003. It also deals yet another serious setback to the agency's efforts to eradicate the disease by year's end. But the W.H.O., a United Nations agency based in Geneva, said...

PLEASANTON, Calif. - Federal health officials are worried about a polio-like form of West Nile virus that has infected more than 30 people, including a California water skier who was bitten by an infected mosquito in Colorado last summer. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta are monitoring the rare disease known as acute flaccid paralysis, or West Nile poliomyelitis, which struck down 32 residents last year in Colorado. "Most of the people have a condition almost identical to that caused by the polio virus," CDC epidemiologist James Sejvar told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Those developing...

State starts polio immunisation 31/07/2004 15:48 - (SA) Print article email story Related Articles W Africa agrees on polio fight Lawsuit against polio boycott Polio vaccines pass tests 'Polio better than infertility' Niger state halts polio shots Takai - The governor of the northern Nigerian state of Kano on Saturday finally launched a long-delayed drive to immunise more than four million children against the crippling polio virus. Governor Ibrahim Shekarau restarted the campaign almost a year after he came under pressure from radical Muslim leaders opposed to vaccination and suspended a UN-backed campaign designed to eradicate polio by the end...

Muslim radicals still oppose polio vaccine July 21 2004 at 08:09AM Kano, Nigeria - A radical Muslim group which triggered panic over polio immunisation in northern Nigeria said on Tuesday it remained opposed to the vaccine, despite it being passed safe by a hardline state government. Polio vacination was suspended in Kano State in August last year after some Muslim imams alleged that the drugs distributed by UN health agencies had been laced with chemicals as part of a western plot to make African girls infertile. On Monday, Kano's Governor Ibrhaim Shekarau announced that local tests had confirmed that the...

An outbreak of polio has hit children in the Nigerian state of Kano. Kano is one of the muslim states that had boycotted the use of the polio vaccine. Many muslim states in Nigeria banned the polio vaccine because those in charge said the Americans were using the vaccines to make their population infertile. Many of them said the vaccine would also be used to spread AIDS in the region. Despite appeals from neighbouring countries to vaccinate its population, the conspiracy theorists in Nigeria got their way. Now, as expected, polio is beginning to spread among children in the region....

KANO, Nigeria - A suspected large-scale polio outbreak was reported Friday among children in a heavily Muslim northern Nigeria state that had boycotted immunization campaigns, and local authorities appealed for urgent action to stop the spread. The suspected outbreak was in Kano state, one of several in northern Nigeria that had shunned polio vaccination drives over suspicions the vaccines were part of a U.S.-led plot to render Muslims sterile. On Friday, local officials in the Kano state city of Rogo disclosed that they had recorded dozens of suspected polio cases in recent weeks. Rogo is 60 miles southeast of the...

<p>Polio -- devastating to thousands of Americans less than two generations ago -- can be the second disease to be wiped from the face of the Earth in our lifetime, following smallpox. But health workers around the globe need a final boost of $100 million for Africa to complete the job in a few remaining countries where fear of vaccine safety, funding shortfalls, and conflict threaten to derail the effort.</p>

Thanks to Muslim clerics in Nigeria, polio is once again spreading through the African continent. Polio — a very debilitating but equally preventable neuromuscular disease — was never completely eradicated from the globe (only smallpox has this distinction). But officials from the World Health Organization say they could have nearly wiped polio off the map by the end of 2005. However, according to reports, Muslim clerics in the Nigerian state of Kano and elsewhere in the northern part of the country convinced government officials to stop providing vaccines months ago. The clerics said the vaccines made in the West were...

The 16-year effort to eradicate polio is threatening to unravel in Africa amid reports yesterday that a 10th country — Sudan — harbors the disease after being free of it for three years. Nigeria, where the current upsurge began, has five times as many cases of polio as it did this time last year, officials at the World Health Organization in Geneva said yesterday. New cases have been found in 30 of its 37 states, with most in the Muslim north, where immunization efforts virtually stopped last year because of political rivalries and rumors about the vaccine's safety. < SNIP...

As polio cases surge in Nigeria and the virus spreads to other countries, western and central Africa are on the brink of the largest polio epidemic in recent years, officials of the World Health Organization and Unicef said today. The 60 polio cases reported by Nigeria last week are the largest number for any week in recent years, the officials said. Last weekend, genetic testing of a child who became paralyzed on May 20 confirmed that a 10th country, Sudan, had experienced polio exported from Nigeria. The W.H.O. called that finding "a stark warning." Equally alarming, health officials said, is...

REUTERS New evidence rebuts a controversial theory that the AIDS pandemic was touched off by contaminated polio vaccines used in the 1950's in what was then the Belgian Congo, American scientists reported yesterday. The theory holds that the vaccines were tainted with chimpanzee tissue that contained an ancestor of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. But in a study published yesterday in the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by Dr. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona said it had discovered a new strain of chimpanzee virus near Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is very...

Botswana has reported its first case of paralytic polio since 1991 as spread of the disease from northern Nigeria further jeopardizes efforts to eradicate it, the World Health Organization said yesterday.Botswana is the ninth previously polio-free country where the crippling disease has reappeared in recent months and the farthest from its presumed source, northern Nigeria. There, officials have stopped polio vaccinations because of religious and political opposition to it, said officials of the WHO, a U.N. agency in Geneva.The Botswana case involves a 7-year-old boy from the Ngami district of northwestern Botswana whose paralysis began on Feb. 8.The government of...