01/13/2016
In Pakistan, the Taliban’s war against public health efforts to vaccinate against polio has struck again, with the murder of 15 outside of a vaccination center in the city of Quetta. Many of the victims were police, who are often seen near the vaccinators because of the danger from murderous jihadists.
Police routinely accompany anti-polio workers to protect them from the Taliban.
A news report about Pakistan polio murders from a year ago stated that “Attacks on immunisation teams have claimed 68 lives since December 2012.” The government of Pakistan instituted an Islam-friendly polio vaccination program in 2014, but it doesn’t seem to have been accepted by the jihadists. As a result, only Pakistan and Afghanistan are still considered polio-endemic nations today after a largely successful worldwide campaign to wipe out the crippling disease. Pakistan recorded more than 300 cases of polio in 2014, which must be counted as more misery caused by backward Islam.
The Taliban brain trust thinks polio shots sterilize children, even though Pakistan has a robust fertility rate of 3.7 children per woman and is the sixth most populous nation in the world with 199 million persons.
Third-world diseases, like polio, are another reason why legal immigration requires newbies to get the standard shots we all got as kids. Hopefully then, we can assume the 304,000 Pakistani immigrants residing in America have met basic public health standards.
Suicide bomber kills at least 15 outside Pakistan polio center, Reuters, January 13, 2016A suicide bomber killed at least 15 people, most of them police, outside a polio eradication center in the Pakistani city of Quetta on Wednesday, the latest militant attack on the anti-polio campaign in the country.
Two militant groups — the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, which has links with the Taliban and has pledged allegiance to Islamic State — separately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The bomb blew up a police van that had just arrived at the center to provide an escort for workers in a drive to immunize all children under five years old in the poor southwestern province of Baluchistan.
“It was a suicide blast, we have gathered evidence from the scene,” Ahsan Mehboob, the provincial police chief told Reuters.
“The police team had arrived to escort teams for the polio campaign.”
Ahmed Marwat, who identified himself as a commander and spokesman for Jundullah, said his group was responsible.
“We claim the bomb blast on the polio office. In the coming days, we will make more attacks on polio vaccination offices and polio workers,” he said by telephone.
The Pakistani Taliban also claimed responsibility in a statement released by their spokesman, Mohammad Khorasani.
Teams in Pakistan working to immunize children against the virus are often targeted by Taliban and other militant groups, who say the campaign is a cover for Western spies, or accuse workers of distributing drugs designed to sterilize children.
The latest attack killed at least 12 policemen, one paramilitary officer and two civilians, officials said. Twenty-five people were wounded.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic, the World Health Organization says.
The campaign to eradicate the virus in Pakistan has had some recent success, with new cases down last year, but violence against vaccination workers has slowed the effort.
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