EXTENDING THE REACH: A health worker administers polio vaccine to a child while her sisters watch, during a Polio National Immunization Day in Karachi, Pakistan. © END POLIO PAKISTAN/SAD SAIDI. WWW.ENDPOLIO.COM.PK
In the spring of 2000, Stephen Cochi, then-director of the Global Immunization Division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stood in the town of Torkham on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, watching thousands of Afghans exit their country through the storied Khyber Pass. They were fleeing for their lives from the violence that had become a regular occurrence as Afghanistan entered its fifth year of civil war against the then-ruling Taliban. But Cochi and his colleagues from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Pakistan’s Federal Ministry of Health saw another opportunity to save lives. As the families crossed into Pakistan on their way to the city of Peshawar, public-health workers escorted any groups that included children who looked to be ...
