Polio returns as Nigerians shun vaccine

POLIO left Dauda Abdullahi with twisted limbs, unable to walk. But he refuses to allow his children to be immunised against the disease that crippled him in Nigeria three decades ago.

“Only Allah can save us. I don’t trust medicine,” the 42-year-old roadside shoemaker said.

Immunising toddlers with mouth drops has reduced the number of polio cases from 350,000 children annually in the 1980s to fewer than 800 worldwide last year.

Yet the virus is spreading again from Nigeria, where UN officials say a third of the world’s cases are the result of a vaccine boycott.

Amid rising Muslim-Western tensions worldwide, Nigeria’s Muslims are heeding allegations that the vaccine is a US plot to spread AIDS or infertility.

Since October, three northern Nigerian states have banned door-to-door vaccinations until they are satisfied the vaccines do not contain harmful substances.

“Since September 11, the Muslim world ... is beginning to be suspicious of any move from the Western world,” said Sule Ya’u Sule, spokesman for the governor of Kano, one of the states where the vaccine is banned. “Our people have become really concerned about polio vaccine.”

UN and Nigerian federal government officials stress the vaccines have repeatedly been proved safe. But detractors do not believe it, and meanwhile polio strains are spreading from northern Nigeria’s trading centre of Kano to at least seven nearby countries where the disease was previously eradicated, says the World Health Organisation’s Bruce Aylward.

Mr Aylward, WHO’s global co-ordinator for the polio eradication campaign, cited dozens of recent cases in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad and Cameroon.

On Sunday, Nigeria sent a team of 12 scientists, government officials and Muslim leaders to South Africa, Indonesia and India to spend a week witnessing tests that would dispel the suspicions.

Muslims in Nigeria’s arid north have become increasingly wary of vaccine initiatives since 1996, when families in Kano accusedPfizer of using an experimental meningitis drug on patients without fully informing them of the risks. The company denied any wrongdoing and a US court dismissed a lawsuit by 20 disabled Nigerians alleged to have taken part in the study, but a US appeals court revived it late last year.

Zubairu Shaba, a former journalist who has lobbied the Nigerian government for compensation on behalf of the Pfizer patients’ families, said he and others distrust the entire Western medical establishment. “So many families won’t go to hospitals again. They prefer to die,” Mr Shaba said.