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Indonesia health officials confirmed two more cases of the paralyzing polio bring the total up to six with about a dozen more possible cases being check. Indonesia makes the 16th country to have polio reintroduced in the last two years and the archipelago nation had been polio free for 10 years.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF work to help the struggling health system in Indonesia to step up their efforts to immunize over 5 million children as soon as possible against this tragic, life-threatening illness. UNICEF also plans to throw in $1.3 million to help with those efforts. Australia also chipped almost a million dollars in to help stem the tide and prevent spreads of the outbreaks in the fear that a large outbreak would spread their homeland too.

About 90% of Indonesia is immunized against polio except for a portion of western Java. All of the cases reported come from the West Java district of Sukabumi, in which only about 55% of the population were immunized.

Officials suspect contamination spread by an Indonesian pilgrim visiting Mecca in Saudi Arabia, who picked probably picked it up from a Nigerian pilgrim. At least 3 of the cases match the viral strain from Nigeria. Nigeria is significant because certain radical Muslim clerics suggested the U.S. had contaminated the vaccines to make Muslims infertile back in 2003. In the process, polio spread to a number of other countries and now to Indonesia. The numbers of polio cases were up slightly this year totaling just over 1200 cases from less than 800 last year. This is still down significantly since 1988, which totaled over 350,000 cases and millions world wide less than a century ago. The disease killed over one million people a year at one point and children are the most susceptible.

A number of countries have experiences resurgence in the disease since the incident in Nigeria two years ago. The disease remains endemic to Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan but Indonesia has people worried because it's the largest populated Muslim country in the world.
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John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.