To try to grasp the full horror of this apparently singular event, it helps to look backward in time and slightly further in space.
One of the best programmes initiated by Rotary International was a commitment undertaken in 1979 to the eradication of polio worldwide. Polio is a disease which kills and paralyses some adults and especially children.
The disease is caused by a virus which is easily transmitted and attacks the central nervous system, affecting muscles and resulting in irreversible paralysis. When respiratory muscles are attacked, there is a 10 per cent probability of death. Once infected, there is no cure - the disease is completely preventable through repeated vaccination, which provides lifetime immunity.
The Rotary campaign on polio was, in 1985, the first and largest private sector-supported international public health initiative. Since 1988, when Rotary's initial $120 million annual contribution was enhanced by partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the campaign has been wildly successful.
By 1991, the Americas were free of polio virus.
The number of cases - 350,000 worldwide in 1988 - has been reduced to 406 in 2013. And the 175 countries where the virus was endemic have been reduced to just three - Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The importance of total eradication can't be overstated.
The World Health Organisation estimates that failure to end polio in the endemic areas could result in as many as 200,000 new cases worldwide in 10 years.
This is where politics, religion and, especially, revenge converge.
This year, 2014, 62 health workers have been killed in Pakistan alone. The motive appears to be the belief these health workers were in collusion with foreign or non-Islamic agencies to impose Western ideas on Pakistanis.
Pakistani parents, in turn, are shunning polio vaccination for their children. As a result, so far this year 66 of the 82 reported cases of polio worldwide have been in Pakistan.
In the months before the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, by Seal Team Six , the CIA was eagerly pursuing the few leads it had to Osama's whereabouts. While a final thread was obtained by following Bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti, the exact location of his compound was pinpointed first by a ruse.
The CIA enlisted a physician who went door-to door in Abattabad promising to deliver free immunisations for hepatitis B and for polio, while taking blood samples. His real purpose was to confirm the true hiding place of Bin Laden through DNA analysis of the samples.
After the Bin Laden raid, the phony immunisation tactic became widely known in Pakistan and created a backlash which has thus far taken the lives of 62 Pakistani health workers and one American volunteer doctor, and has resulted in many new cases of polio in Pakistan and renewed the threat of many more cases to come.
United States President Barack Obama has ordered that the CIA no longer use such phony medical ruses to achieve its ends. That may be reassuring to American ears but is of small comfort to families of the dead health workers and the present and future sufferers of polio in Pakistan and the rest of the world.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
