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Main | World Understanding Award | Finalist
Winner
Tomas van Houtryve
VII Photo Agency

"BEHIND THE CURTAINS OF 21ST CENTURY COMMUNISM"

Finalist
Javier Arcenillas
Freelance

"SICARIOS"

Finalist
Mary F. Calvert
ZUMA Press

"POLIO'S LINE IN THE SAND"

Finalist
Ed Ou
Getty Images

"THE YOUTH OF AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION"

Finalist
Mary F. Calvert
ZUMA Press


"POLIO'S LINE IN THE SAND"

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Crippled by polio, Musa Asa, about 18 years old, makes about forty cents a day, shoveling sand dredged from the Tamburawa River, outside Kano, Nigeria. He has been working there four years. Religious zealotry and misinformation have coerced villagers in the Muslim north of Nigeria into refusing polio vaccinations and led to the reemergence of polio only a few years after it nearly joined smallpox on the IDC’s list of eradicated diseases. The polio vaccine was banned in northern Nigeria in the summer of 2003 due to claims by clerics and politicians that the vaccines were tainted and were a Western ploy to spread HIV and make the Muslim girls sterile. During the one year ban, over 3000 children were crippled by polio and over 20 countries re-infected with the Nigeria strain of the virus.