Nigeria Resumes Polio Campaign Despite Protest

Nigeria launched a new round of polio immunizations on Monday to stem an outbreak of the crippling virus, in the face of opposition by some Islamic leaders who insisted the vaccines were contaminated.

Nigeria launched a new round of polio immunizations on Monday to stem an outbreak of the crippling virus, in the face of opposition by some Islamic leaders who insisted the vaccines were contaminated. The predominantly Muslim state of Kano, whose population of seven million is second only to Lagos, extended its boycott of the campaign while it awaited delivery of a fresh batch of vaccines from Asia. Kano’s boycott has allowed the virus to infect 400 children in Nigeria in six months, and it has also spread to eight other countries previously declared polio-free — setting back global health bodies’ plans to eradicate polio by the end of 2005. President Olusegun Obasanjo opened Nigeria’s second campaign in as many months at a ceremony in Zamfara, another predominantly Muslim state which had joined Kano’s boycott but has now decided to resume immunization. “This is significant, it means that 35 out of 36 states are now ready to immunize their children and kick polio out of Africa once and for all,” UNICEF spokesman Gerrit Berger said by phone from Gusua, Zamfara state’s capital. UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Fund, and other global health bodies are sponsoring the immunization of 63 million children in 10 West African countries in a campaign that began in February. A panel of health officers and Muslim leaders set up last month to test the vaccines submitted its final report to Obasanjo last week, saying they were safe. The government has not released the report. The influential Supreme Council for Sharia, an Islamic group, accused the government of covering up the test results which it said revealed traces of infertility agents and other impurities. It dismissed the government tactics as a “ruse” and said it will continue its campaign against the vaccines. “We in the Sharia Council will carry out an enlightenment campaign for our people to jettison the vaccines,” said the group’s chairman Datti Ahmed, quoted in Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper. Kano is an opposition stronghold and some analysts say its rejection of the vaccines has more to do with politics than health, but the state spokesman denied this.”Our decision is not political. It is based on the report of a technical committee and until it is disproved, we will not use the contaminated federal government vaccines,” spokesman Sule Ya’u Sule said by telephone from Kano. Some in Kano suspect that a 1996 drug trial by U.S.-based pharmaceuticals firm Pfizer could be to blame for heightened suspicions over the vaccine. Kano authorities have said some children in the state died after being given experimental antibiotics for meningitis manufactured by Pfizer. A legal case brought by the children’s families was reopened by a New York appeals court last year. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is one of five countries where polio is endemic and it accounted for about half of all 758 polio cases worldwide in 2003, according to the World Health Organization. (Source: Reuters Health, March 2004)