Polio scare
Ukrainian health officials fear a major polio outbreak, after it is announced that the disease has paralyzed two children in the south-western region of Trans-Carpathia. Many Ukrainian children are not vaccinated, and less than 14% of one year children have been immunized against polio. Officials have launched a national immunization campaign that will embrace all children up to ten years old. Parent:
The vaccinations are much more dangerous than the illnesses that they treat. Nobody knows how the vaccines were stored or if the expiration dates were changed.
Health experts say anti-immunization activists and parents, some of whom include local doctors, are flat-out wrong, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the vaccines used in Ukraine:
(They believe) that a child should build up his or her immunity in a natural environment, that the immune system should work itself out by being exposed to illnesses. They don’t understand how serious these diseases are.