PRESS DIGEST
A Chicago club fighting polio
Karin Davies, Chicago Tribune
January 8, 1998
BUTAJIRA, Ethiopia - As children gathered for polio vaccinations beneath cough-drop fragrant eucalyptus trees, a grim drama was under way at a nearby clinic. A 17-year-old girl, her skin burnished by sweat, struggled to strengthen legs withered by polio. Mahuba Shifa pulled herself along the clinic's parallel bars, dragging heavily braced, child-size legs.
“Had I been vaccinated, I would not be crippled,” said Shifa, who was stricken before she learned to walk. “I am very happy that the children are being vaccinated because they won't end up like me.”
Her cousins were among 8.5 million small children across mountainous Ethiopia who swallowed drops of oral polio vaccine as part of a crash campaign to bring down the country's incidence of polio.
After years of neglect that left this impoverished country with one of the world's highest rates of polio, Ethiopian officials accepted a new approach to eradication that has worked in 105 other countries.
Over five days in November, 75,000 health workers and volunteers traveled by pickup truck, bicycle or foot to 25,000 posts in almost every village and urban neighborhood to vaccinate every child under age 5. The operation was repeated over three days in mid-December because several doses are needed for full protection.
The $4.6 million effort was financed by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the UN Children's Fund and Rotary International.
It is another important step toward a polio-free world by the year 2000, a goal advanced in 1981 by Rotary, the Chicago-based service club for business and professional people, and adopted by the 166-nation World Health Assembly a decade ago.
“If progress continues at the present pace, wild polio viruses could be eradicated from the world by the year 2000,” said Dr. Harry Hull, the Geneva-based chief of WHO's polio program.
There is a precedent. After a 12-year eradication program, the last case of smallpox was recorded in Somalia in 1977—23-year-old Ali Maow Maalin developed the disease and lived. Two years later, after intense verification, the world was declared free of the disease.
Success in beating polio would help Ethiopians overcome other chronic health problems, including deadly outbreaks of measles, pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis, experts say. WHO estimates that once polio is eradicated and immunization halted, the global savings in immunization, treatment and rehabilitation costs will amount to more than $1.5 billion a year.
In the last decade, more than 1 billion children have been immunized against polio. The number of cases has been slashed by 90 percent—down from an about 350,000 cases to 35,000 to 40,000 today. An estimated 2 million to 3 million children who would have been disabled by polio are able to run, walk and play normally.
But for Shifa and up to 20 million others worldwide living with polio paralysis, the eradication program has come too late. Her family, typical of many Ethiopians, believed her illness was a punishment from God. Ashamed, they kept their daughter hidden inside their mud-walled hut in Butajira, 85 miles south of the capital, Addis Abeba. Because Shifa was confined to a reed mat, crawling just occasionally, her leg and buttock muscles atrophied. Finally, just months ago, she was brought the few miles to Acacia House to get the help she needs.
A WHO medical epidemiologist, Bernard Moriniere, estimates Ethiopia has 500 to 1,000 new cases of polio each year, making it one of the largest reservoirs of wild polio virus in the world. The poliomyelitis virus, also called infantile paralysis, can spread from the intestines and attack the brain and spinal cord. One in 200 unimmunized children is paralyzed, and 10 percent of those die.
In the 1940s and 1950s, iron lungs were used to regulate breathing and keep paralyzed polio patients alive. Today, the body-encasing cylinder largely has been replaced by a ventilator that forces air in and out of lungs through a hole cut in the trachea. Neither is available in developing countries such as Ethiopia.
Polio remains endemic in 116 countries. WHO has targeted trouble spots mainly in Africa, among them Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Ethiopia; and in Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The disease has been wiped out in 155 nations, including North and South America, Western Europe, China and Australia.
In the mountains above Addis Abeba, a dozen small children wearing leg braces played a wobbly game of soccer at Cheshire House, a haven for polio victims.
“Parents take their children to holy water, witch doctors, to hospitals, then they finally come to us. They think we are miracle workers because we can help their children walk again,” said Fasil Ayele, the center's administrator.
“The real miracle would be in eradicating this disease.”
