Polio and rumors spreading in Nigeria

By Glenn McKenzie
The Associated Press

	GEORGE OSODI / AP Tobe Ejorfo, 4, receives drops of polio vaccine at the Ore-Ofe nursery school in Lagos, Nigeria, yesterday.
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LAGOS, Nigeria — Squeezing droppers into the mouths of tearful toddlers, health workers launched an emergency drive yesterday to vaccinate Nigerians against polio, an effort impeded by rumors among Muslim fundamentalists that the vaccine was part of a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and render Muslims infertile.

Teams raced to immunize 15 million African children at immediate risk as a spreading outbreak — Nigeria has 192 known cases — threatened efforts to eradicate the disease.

"The Western world has never wished Muslims well," said Yakubu Husseini, a 20-year-old teacher coming out of Friday prayers in the northern city of Kano. "Why should they expect us to believe that vaccines they make these days are not another frontier to wage war against Muslims?"

Three predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria — Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara — have either delayed or refused permission for the vaccination drive. In addition, many Muslim families in the conservative north had warned health officials they would refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated.

Muslims and Christians have largely embraced the program in Nigeria's south, where the main problem is a lack of vehicles, drugs, storage equipment and volunteers, said Caroline Akosile, a U.N. Children's Fund official.

Polio usually infects children under the age of 5 through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, wasting muscles, deformation and, in some cases, death.

Failure of previous vaccine initiatives in northern Nigeria have aided the disease's spread internationally, recently leading to the crippling of nearly a dozen children in at least four other West African nations: Ghana, Togo, Niger and Burkina Faso.

International immunization campaigns have slashed the number of countries where polio virus is still breeding to seven: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia. Ninety-nine percent of all new polio cases in the world are in Nigeria, Pakistan and India.

The Nigerian outbreak started in Kano state during the summer.

In some areas only 16 percent of children were immunized during a campaign last year. Nigerian Muslims have become increasingly suspicious of vaccine initiatives since 1996, when families in Kano accused New York-based Pfizer of using an experimental meningitis drug on patients without fully informing them of the risks.

The company denied wrongdoing in a subsequent U.S. federal lawsuit by 20 disabled Nigerians alleged to have taken part in the study. The case was dismissed, but a U.S. appeals court recently revived it.

Rumors gained further strength in August after Datti Ahmed, a Nigerian physician who leads a well-known Islamic fundamentalist pressure group, suggested WHO was covertly spreading anti-fertility drugs in its vaccines, an allegation the United Nations and Nigerian government have dismissed.

Akosile, the UNICEF official, said the polio vaccines had been repeatedly certified as safe in Nigeria and abroad.

"We are trying to get that message out to the politicians, village chiefs and the religious leaders in the mosques," Akosile said.

In Kano, where state officials said yesterday they were delaying the vaccine drive without explaining why, a group of men leaving the city's main mosque discussed the decision.

"Allah knows better than all Western powers combined," said Ya'u Kabir, a 26-year-old Muslim theology student. "He has guided the Muslim community since the time of old. This he did without immunization. We do not need it."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company