A house-to-house polio vaccination drive will begin in Afghanistan next month after the Taliban government agreed to support the campaign, the World Health Organisation and Unicef said on Monday.
Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan are the last countries in the world with endemic polio, an incurable and highly infectious disease transmitted through sewage that can cause crippling paralysis in young children.
Polio has been virtually eliminated globally through a decades-long inoculation drive.
But insecurity, inaccessible terrain, mass displacement and suspicion of outside interference have hampered mass vaccination in Afghanistan and some areas of Pakistan.
Health workers are due to begin the campaign on November 8. It will be the first in more than three years aimed at all children in the country, including more than 3 million in remote and previously inaccessible areas.
"This decision will allow us to make a giant stride in the efforts to eradicate polio," said Herve Ludovic De Lys, Unicef’s representative in Afghanistan.
"To eliminate polio completely, every child in every household across Afghanistan must be vaccinated, and with our partners, this is what we are setting out to do," he said.
A second campaign, due to begin in co-ordination with a campaign in Pakistan in December, has also been agreed.
According to figures compiled before the collapse of the Western-backed government in August, there was one reported case of the wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in Afghanistan in 2021, compared with 56 in 2020.
Until the disease is eliminated completely, it remains a threat to human health in all countries, especially for those with vulnerable health systems, because of the risk of importing the disease.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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