At one of Somalia's countless road-blocks, militiamen with Kalashnikovs stop passing vehicles and search for children. A truck approaches, laden with timber and passengers, among them several mothers with infants. The militiamen order them to dismount; and they refuse to let the truck proceed until all the children have been vaccinated. In the struggle against polio, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has forged some strange alliances. The disease paralyses children and sometimes kills them, by causing their lungs to seize up. In 1988 it infected an estimated 350,000 people. Since then, 2 billion children have been immunised under the auspices of the WHO'S Global Polio Eradication Initiative. On April 16th, the WHO announced that only 537 cases had been reported in 2001, and the true figure is thought to be no more than double that.
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