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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...