Polio returns to cripple Angola and its neighbors
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LUANDA — Linda Afonso’s right leg is stiff and atrophied but she does not know the name of the disease that made it that way.
The 13-year-old lives in Cacuaco, a sprawling slum in the northern suburbs of the Angolan capital, Luanda. When she was a small child, her leg became partially paralyzed.
“My parents took me to the hospital, but they couldn’t do anything,” she said.
Afonso doesn’t know the name of her disease because polio, the acute viral infection that can cause irreversible paralysis or death, was eradicated in Angola in 2002, shortly after she caught it.
Despite Angola’s crumbling health infrastructure and poor sanitation in the slums of Luanda — where thousands of refugees fled during the country’s 27-year civil war — health workers managed to eliminate new polio infections from 2002 to 2005..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110207com3.html
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