Excuse me? Do you know how close we are to eradicating polio? Eradication. Nobody will ever die or suffer from polio again, forever. This will save millions of lives over the years, more people than Bin Laden could ever kill. We are so close to this goal, and to put it in danger just because we have a grudge against someone is beyond irresponsible.
It is NEVER worth putting at risk even one GLOBAL humanitarian campaign that has been going on since 1988 and is so far 99.9% effective, has cost billions of dollars, has saved thousands, if not millions of lives, and is very close to meeting its goals. If it meets its goals, then there is no more suffering or death from polio forever, just to get one person. Even if this person was a murderous thug.
There was a time where polio was feared in the United States, there was a time were Americans suffered, children died. People lived in iron lungs, and we had a President with polio paralysis. (Franklin D. Roosevelt) Vaccination was so important that the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." This lead to the development of the vaccine(s). We are removed from it, so now we don't seem to care about the others who aren't. There hasn't been polio in the North American continent since 1994.
The United States was so focused on Bin Ladin and catching him that they were willing to do whatever it took without thinking about the consequences of their actions. They had serious blinders on.
> The United States was so focused on Bin Ladin and catching him that they were willing to do whatever it took without thinking about the consequences of their actions. They had serious blinders on.
The message is: Don't mess with the US because "they be crazy, yo" and will go through whatever lengths to hit back even if it means endangering life on this very planet (also see: the Cold War).
It's bad, and there seems to be no power to keep it in check.
Yes. A grudge. Eradicating polio is in a completely different league than Osama and what he did. The whole WTC-terrorist subplot is an irrelevant non-issue compared with polio program. Also, the world is not contained within US borders.
http://www.polioeradication.org
372 cases last year.