Dr. Ali Khan knelt down outside a Karachi doorway and extended his hand. The young girl who, moments earlier, had just received the polio vaccine extended her hand and a skeptical look toward the smiling doctor in a red hat emblazoned with a white N.
“On the front lines in Karachi, meeting a superstar who just got her polio protection. Every drop counts!” Khan wrote in an October social media post accompanying the photo. The dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was there to help Pakistan’s push to eradicate polio.
Khan being called to the other side of the globe by a preventable disease while a different preventable disease – measles – surges in his home country is context not lost on Khan, one of the nation’s leading experts on combating the spread of infectious diseases. It might be considered ironic, he thinks, were the stakes not so immense.
