Islamist insurgency strongly influences where polio occurs

Islamist insurgency has had a strong effect on where polio cases occur since 2011, potentially as a reaction to the use of counterinsurgency strategies, according to new research led by UCL. In research published today in the open access journal Globalization and Health, lead author Dr Jonathan Kennedy (UCL Political Science) and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Cambridge University (Professor Lawrence King) analysed cross-national data for the period 2003-14. They found that Islamist insurgency did not have a significant positive relationship with polio throughout the whole period studied. However, in the past few years - since Osama bin Laden's assassination in 2011- Islamist insurgency has had a strong effect on polio prevalence. The evidence for a relationship between non-Islamist insurgency and polio was found to be less compelling. There is widespread agreement among global health professionals that civil war is associated with disease in general and particularly obstructs efforts to eradicate polio, a disease which has been very effectively controlled in much of the world via targeted immunisation programmes. Although it has been suggested that Islamist insurgents have a particularly negative effect on vaccination programmes, the claim is controversial and hasn't been studied quantitatively previously.