Good thing marijuana isn't a treatment...

...or they'd just be SOL if they were here.

Infantile paralysis. Poliomyelitis. Polio. The word still strikes a nerve. When I was a child, it was still a major threat, something to be feared. I had an uncle who contracted polio. He lived, but as a complete bed-ridden invalid for the rest of his life. My brother, not three years older than me, was a "polio pioneer," one of the 1.8 million school children who participated in the first full field trial of the Salk vaccine. I remember the Salk vaccine, the painful injections and the boosters. And I remember the Sabin vaccine, which I got as part of a mass public inoculation program.

Now, thanks to those vaccines and a major worldwide effort, polio has basically disappeared from the US to the extent that I've met school-age children who don't even know what it is and the incidence and range of polio has been dramatically reduced over the last 15 or so years.

Reduced - but not eliminated. And it's coming back. Time magazine has a short slide show about it; the following text is constructed from excerpts from there.

Indonesia this week launched a quick vaccination program, targeting some 6.4 million children for immunization over a two-day period in the hope of stemming a polio outbreak in he Sukabumi region, where polio has recently affected 15 children.

The outbreak comes after ten years of Indonesia being free of polio. Indonesia is the 16th previously polio-free country to be re-infected in the past two years; 13 of the others are in Africa.

The government hopes a quick mass immunization program will contain the first outbreak of the crippling disease in a decade. Polio is a waterborne virus that usually affects infants and toddlers, causing paralysis, withered muscles and sometimes death. There is no cure.

This and previous short posts about efforts against polio in Nigeria and Liberia and India combine to make a brutal reminder of what is really important in this world and what spending (so far) something around $175 billion in Iraq is truly costing.