A woman who gave her name as Mrs. Ahsan said the restrictions were discriminatory and unfair. “We have been singled out in the world,” she said. For some experts, the worry is that immunizing all travelers will divert scarce resources from efforts to fight polio where it is most prevalent. Dr. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta of the Center for Excellence in Women and Child Health at Karachi’s Aga Khan University, said the W.H.O. travel advisory was “unfortunate,” and would foster an erroneous sense that polio is a universal problem in Pakistan.
“It’s not — it’s a geographic problem, and this will take the pressure off the hot spots,” he said.
One such hot spot is on the edge of Karachi where, on a desolate stretch of road at the city gates, the fight against polio is being fought bus by bus.
Buses filled with ethnic Pashtuns, fleeing poverty or conflict in the northwest, enter the city every day; some are unwittingly carrying the polio virus from areas where infection rates are highest, W.H.O. officials say.
On Friday morning a team of eight government health workers, clad in bright yellow jackets and blue caps, boarded passenger buses as they entered the city, administering the vaccine to children under the age of 5.
via Disease of Pakistan’s Poor Now Worries the Affluent – NYTimes.com.
Ismailimail 