Donald Trump may be the most dangerous President in US history, but not for the reason people fear most. Putting to one side questions about his dealings with Russia, support for Nuclear proliferation, illegal Muslim travel ban, and desire to wall-off Mexico – not to mention his views about women – Trump is an avowed ‘anti-vaxxer’, taking to Twitter in 2014 to support the discredited claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and then repeating his error in a September 2015 Republican primary debate stating:

“You take this little beautiful baby, and you pump – I mean, it just looks like it is meant for a horse, not for a child, and we had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”

And it seems that it’s not only the MMR vaccine that he has in his sights. In January Trump invited well-known vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr to Trump Tower to discuss, according to Kennedy, “vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” Kennedy got one thing right, however, when he added in defence of his meeting, “we ought to be debating the science.”

We certainly should be debating the science, because the science is unequivocal: the widespread introduction of vaccines for a host of diseases was the greatest lifesaver of the Twentieth Century, not only sparing millions of families the pain of death and disability, but also transforming parts of the world through trade and economic development. In 1979 the world celebrated the success of the global campaign to eradicate smallpox, an achievement only made possible by the development of the smallpox vaccine by Gloucestershire doctor Edward Jenner nearly two hundred years earlier.

To this day smallpox remains the only disease to be eradicated but, as my book The Health of Nations explores, the eradication of a second disease, polio, is now tantalisingly close – an epic achievement brought about by the announcement fifty-two years ago that Dr Jonas Salk had developed the Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) which, followed by the introduction of Albert Sabin’s Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV), led polio cases to plummet around the world. In the US, polio cases fell by 80-90% in the two years following the introduction of the polio vaccine, while no naturally occurring cases of polio have been reported in the UK since 1982.

Eradicating a disease is no easy task and almost all efforts to do so have ended in failure. Global health workers have many things standing in their way; vast inhospitable terrain, outbreaks of war, religious objectors, funding gaps, and changes in government priorities. Yet the strongest weapon in their arsenal remains the vaccines themselves.

To take one example, the development and introduction of MenAfriVac, a vaccine for meningococcal A meningitis, the strain most destructive to communities in Africa’s meningitis belt, has been a stunning success, protecting more than 235 million people in more than 26 countries. Thanks to this one vaccine alone, meningitis A is almost a thing of the past in sub-Saharan Africa.

If worldwide contributions to vaccine efforts stay on course, it is estimated that 23.3 million lives will be saved due to immunization between 2011 and 2020. Privately, of course, health workers fear that under the Trump administration such efforts will not stay on course, and that the rise of ‘alternative facts’ puts global health programs including those for polio, malaria and measles, in peril.

Research shows that one third of Trump’s supporters agree with his anti-vaccination rhetoric. But vaccine scepticism is a much wider phenomena, with fears of the “poisoned lancet” stretching back for centuries only to be made popular again in middle-class Britain and America by growing support for ‘alternative medicine’ and organic living. If vaccine-refusal rates continue to grow, inaccurate vaccine scepticism will be responsible for turning the clock back to an era when families were blighted by illnesses like polio, measles and whooping cough. (The year that the polio vaccine was announced was also the year of the Montgomery bus boycott, the opening of Disneyland and the hanging of Ruth Ellis). In the intervening decades we have been more than happy to see the back of these childhood killers, but we should be in no doubt that by giving casual credence to the claims of vaccine sceptics, we are putting millions of lives at risk.

By Amna Khwaja

‘There’s nothing to say that it’s against religion for women to play football. It’s not against our religion, and it’s not against our culture.’

Dressed in the national football strip of Afghanistan, Khalida Popal is kicking a football for the photographer. Appearing at the Beyond Sport summit in London, she exudes a sense of the steely determination she has needed to survive after her teenage interest in the game put her life in danger, and changed the course of her future.

‘When I was teenager I started playing football,’ Khalida says. ‘It was 2004, I was sixteen,and we were just playing and having fun. The good thing about football is that you can bring as many people as you can find, and just kick the ball.’

Growing up in a middle-class family in Kabul, 29 yr old Khalida had a wider sense of possibility than many other Afghan girls. Her mother was a sports teacher, and the family placed no limitations on their daughters, encouraging them to do their best and blossom. But, of course, Khalida, was growing up in Afghanistan, and vividly remembers her total disbelief when the Taliban seized power and her father told her she wouldn’t be able to go to school any more. In 2004 the country was still reeling from the consequences of Taliban rule, and the American invasion after the 9/11 attacks. Although improving the rights of women had been cited by western politicians as part of the reason for the incursion, women remained second-class citizens, with muted voices, in many places living out a primitive existence.

On Khalida’s dusty school yard some of their country’s wider problems could be forgotten – but it wasn’t long before the girls had a cruel encounter with some men who attacked their playing field; hurling abuse, damaging their football, and running away with their bags. Football was a man’s game – and the women who played it were surely little more than prostitutes, they claimed. For Khalida the insults were made worse by the fact that she also often heard them from other women, the most marginalised people attacking themselves.

‘We were already wearing long skirts, long sleeves and tights, but these people were against women’s development and participation in society in general,’ Khalida says.

In a country where standing up for equal rights was usually unthinkable, Khalida was propelled to keep going – and go further: three years later, in 2007, spearheading the launch of the first national women’s football team. It was a hugely exciting development, but Khalida’s hardships continued.

When she became the first female employee of Afghanistan Football Federation, she found herself in an office surrounded by chauvinist men who were threatened by her presence and refused refused to collect their pay checks from her. Later they would come back, embarrassed, after Khalida insisted that she wouldn’t allow a man to act as an intermediary for her.

‘Some of my colleagues even didn’t want to be in the same office as me. When I entered the office, they left. They didn’t want to talk.’

As well-known members of Kabul society and government, however, Khalida’s family were still under grave threat and, fearing for their lives, Khalida and her parents soon departed for Pakistan where they spent eight years in a refugee camp. Starting over in such tough conditions was very difficult, but the one thing that sustained Khalida was football – something that she found she could pursue in Pakistan which already had women’s football teams. The Afghanistan women’s football team played its first international game on a Pakistani pitch – a proud if farcical moment, as Khalida explains:

‘It was first time that we played football on real grass, because in Afghanistan we only played in the dust. In our first game we were all falling down, and slipping everywhere. It was crazy. It was so funny.’

Although she returned to Afghanistan, Khalida was forced to go underground and flee once more after her football career put her in too much danger. Home now is Copenhagen where she has been granted political asylum and where, at long last, she has been joined by her parents. Although she admires Denmark greatly, and notes the contrast to women’s lives, Khalida says she is weary of a disrupted life that means constantly meeting new people, and making new friends, before being forced to uproot and move on once again.

‘At some point you’re tired of making any new networks. You are tired of making friends. You fear that once again you will have to leave, and you will lose them, and it will hurt you, and that will make you so lonely and depressed. This is war that gives us this ‘gift’: wars take so many things from people around the world. ‘

Although a knee injury means that she can no longer play herself, it is Khalida’s belief that the power of women keeps them striding forward. Since leaving Afghanistan, Khalida estimates that more than three thousand women are involved in playing football. American soccer player and coach Kelly Lindsey now manages the Afghanistan women’s team, and Khalida was involved in securing long-term sponsorship from Danish sportswear brand Hummel – as well as their unique design for a new kit with an inbuilt hijab.

“Women need self-confidence and they can gain that through sport,’ Khalida says ‘Then nobody can stop them. I believe in the power of women, they are strong.”

By Amna Khwaja

When I was a little girl my father would take me my by the hand and walk me across the road from his shop on Young Street, Kensington, so that we could look at the marzipan cats, lined up in rows, on the sweet counter in Barkers department store. The cats had small heads and pointy ears and pot bellies – and I liked the yellow ones the best. But even more than the cats, I liked being with my father. I liked it so much I was his tiny office assistant, scrawling a little girl’s signature on his cheque book, and whisking the handle backwards and forwards on the old credit card machine, wasting endless paper slips. I was the chosen child.

My father was a quiet and reserved man with a dry, self depreciating, sense of humour. He arrived from Pakistan in the 1950s after working in France, Switzerland, Japan and even Iran. Although he came from a distinguished family of doctors, his sensitive nature had undermined a prospective career in medicine. A spell working in an operating theatre led to a collapse, and after that he concentrated on accounts; he was a figures man running a dizzying array of family businesses, including a nanny agency, a book supplier to Holborn Law College, and a famous boutique off Kensington High Street that imported cheesecloth shirts and supplied Mary Quant.

Dressed in his polo neck sweater, hound-tooth blazer and carrying a briefcase, my father was a businessman about town. With his dark hair swept back, and his moustache, he was once called the best-dressed gentleman in Kensington. Some said he looked a little like Omar Sharif. Certainly, my father did not believe in casual attire, and he claimed never to have worn a pair of jeans in his life.

Whatever his business skills, my father was much more than an accountant – he was a dreamer too. As a young man his tastes had included playing the violin, and writing satirical articles for his college magazine. On outings I would sit beside him in the front seat of our Mercedes while we cruised across West London, tuning the radio into classical music. My sister sat in the backseat and wanted to listen to Wham.

First and foremost my father was a family man, although we arrived quite late in his life after a short-lived marriage to my young Catholic Irish mother, whom he had met in the tax office. After they separated, I went everywhere with him; a quiet ghost who accompanied him on all his appointments to the town hall, the boutique, and the bank. At night we watched his favourite viewing – Miss Marple.

No one noticed anything was wrong, until the day, years later, of my university graduation. We met at my Aunty’s house in Fulham, and climbed into the car for the ride across town to the ceremony. As we approached the tunnel near the Barbican my father became confused. He seemed to forget where he was. Who he was. We drove round and round a complicated series of streets – until something clicked and my father was my father once more. We arrived with a little time to spare.

For years we ignored the signs, but of course my father was one of the millions of people diagnosed with frontal lobe Alzheimer’s. For him his disease has been a dizzying, terrifying descent – and for me also. The carers who fondly call him Abdul, but a shock to me who only ever heard him called Mr Khwaja. The handfuls of pens and spoons cluttering his pockets. The care home with its angry and confused residents locked in death’s waiting room. Well meaning people tell me he is ‘happy in his world’, but what I sense from him mostly is frustration.

With the support of our family, especially my auntie and her daughter, we weathered the storm until he needed to be attended to full-time. Until he became a sun-downer, as they are known in the dementia world; his night our day, pacing up and down with those around him unable to rest incase, in a stray second, he opens a door and escapes, like a toddler running into a busy road. With such responsibility comes tremendous guilt, wishing on some level that his torment could be over, but at the same time not wanting him to go.

Alzheimer’s is no longer a hidden disease, it seems to have eaten its way through our world like it eats its way through the brain – affecting more people than ever. We don’t know why.

As my father tells me every time I see him, with a look of nervousness on his face that wants to lead him back to his old life – there’s a lot of work to be done. A lot of work on the origins of the disease, a lot of work on caring. My father doesn’t know where his life’s work lies anymore, he only knows he should be out there doing it.