Portside

The U.S. was wrong to use health workers to target Osama bin Laden.

In October 1956 the ascending rock idol lent his considerable stardom to helping save lives by getting vaccinated against polio on the Ed Sullivan show. Today an anti-vax fanatic with a celebrity name is in line to be in charge of public health.

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Fears of a polio resurgence in the US have health officials on high alert. A virologist explains the history of this dreaded disease, why it's resurfacing today and what we need to do to combat it.

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The polio vaccine highlights the networks of women—some scientists, some not, some named, and some not—who made the laborious, costly, and difficult work of vaccine development possible.

Measles, like polio and smallpox, is a horrible disease - it's still a major killer of young children in the developing world. The creation of a vaccine was widely welcomed. Measles is so contagious that it is used as the indicator disease to show deficits in immunization coverage of all vaccine-preventable diseases-which means the problem goes well beyond measles. We are now seeing outbreaks of whooping cough in the US, mumps in Britain and tuberculosis more widely.

In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio worldwide. Last year there were 223. But getting all the way to zero will mean spending billions of dollars, penetrating the most remote regions of the globe, and facing down Taliban militants to get to the last unprotected children on Earth.