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Nigeria

What Bill Gates Has Done That's Setting Off Radical Islamist Killing Sprees

The Microsoft founder and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are active in trying to eradicate polio. But immunization efforts have led to deadly attacks from Nigeria to Pakistan.

Bill Gates in Africa
Bill Gates in Africa
Michael Kelley

Efforts like the one being led by Bill Gates and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have reduced the number of children paralyzed by the polio virus from 350,000 in 1998 to fewer than 225 cases in 2012.

But the last remnants of the the debilitating disease must be wiped out in Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, or else it will make a comeback.

Radical islamic militants are preventing that from happening by attacking clinics, health workers, and police who travel with vaccinators to administer the vaccine to children.

Earlier this month in northern Nigeria, armed men linked to Islamist extremist group Boko Haram killed nine people at a clinic after a local cleric denounced polio vaccination campaigns and local radio programs saying the campaigns are part of a foreign plot to sterilize Muslims.

Epicenter

The province, Kona, is now the epicenter of polio infections in Africa as it has refused to participate in the vaccination campaign.

In Pakistan a total of 18 people have been killed in the last three months, including a police officer who was escorting a polio team in the tribal areas in the country's northwest.

The cultural suspicions may be even messier in Pakistan where came to light that CIA hired a Pakistani doctor to give out hepatitis B vaccine in Abbottabad in March 2011 in an apparent effort to get DNA samples from Osama bin Laden’s hide-out.

"Boko Haram and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan share a common ideology and common strategy and ... their targets are similar," Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, told the Guardian. "Boko Haram have targeted police stations, politicians, religious clerics who speak out against them and people engaging in polio vaccination programmes."

The tactics have been effective as polio infections have doubled in Pakistan since 2009, new cases are on the rise in Afghanistan, and a polio virus traced to Pakistan was recently found in sewers in Cairo, Egypt (which hasn't seen a case since 2004).

Total eradication

Gates, Microsoft"s 57-year-old co-founder, who has donated an estimated $28 billion to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is determined to completely eradicate the disease.

"Polio's pretty special because once you get an eradication you no longer have to spend money on it," Gates told The Times of India. "It's just there as a gift for the rest of time ... All you need is over 90 percent of children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops spreading ... The great thing about finishing polio is that we'll have resources to get going on malaria and measles."

David Scales of The Disease Daily notes that the key to success in the remaining infected areas is "regaining trust of both the local people and religious leaders," which led northern Nigeria to resume polio vaccinations after a 2003 boycott. Until then, the polio teams need more protection.

Pakistanis aren't so optimistic about solving it through cultural outreach.

"There is only one lasting solution to this and that is to militarily defeat the Taliban once and for all," according to an editorial in the Pakistan Express Tribune.

Polio, a highly infectious viral disease that can cause permanent paralysis in a matter of hours, usually infects children living in unsanitary conditions.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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