An Apolitical Virus: Strife Fuels Polio's Return to Middle East

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/world-health-organization-slows-campaign-against-polio-in-syria-a-934651.html



Polio is making a comeback in a decimated part of Syria, but the delicate politics of the war are making vaccination campaigns difficult. As an epidemic looms over the region, anger over the World Health Organization's inaction is growing.

An Apolitical Virus: Strife Fuels Polio's Return to Middle East
By Christoph Reuter
November 21, 2013 – 05:22 PM

Dr. Khalid Milaji, a Syrian doctor, is very angry with the World Health Organization (WHO). "They knew it!" he says. "We have been warning them for more than a month that polio is spreading, but they refuse to send the vaccine!" Milaji is part of the Polio Control Task Force, a group trying to rein in a new polio epidemic in Syria with Western assistance, and he is furious that the organization has been resisting their calls for help.

This is the same United Nations organization that has waged an extremely successful campaign against infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, since 1988. In that time, cases of polio have been reduced by 99 percent and the number of affected countries has declined from 125 to half a dozen.

And yet, for weeks, WHO had blocked a vaccination campaign aimed at containing what is probably the most dangerous outbreak in years, in the Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor. The UN organization even tried to stop the analysis of virus samples.

The reason: WHO has a policy of cooperating exclusively with the government in Damascus, even in times of war, despite the fact that the central government has long since given up on Deir ez-Zor. President Bashar Assad's army controls only two districts of the provincial capital, with the remainder of the whole province in rebel hands.