Health workers in the northern Nigerian state of Kano will on Saturday launch a drive to immunise more than four million infants against polio, despite ongoing opposition from Islamic radicals.
Since August last year, when a small number of hardline imams claimed that polio vaccine had been contaminated by Western agents, Kano has become the epicentre of the world’s fastest-growing outbreak of the crippling virus.
Now, after carrying out local tests on a vaccine that has proved safe and effective across the globe, Kano’s Governor Ibrahim Shekarau has decided to restart a United Nations-backed drive to eradicate the disease by the end of the year.
The exercise, originally scheduled to begin on Thursday before it was moved to Friday, will now begin on Saturday, a senior official in the state ministry of health, Shuaibu Umar Yola, told journalists.
He said the postponement was to give Shekarau time to recover from a “taxing” nine-day visit to Brazil after his return late on Thursday.
The governor is to travel to the remote farming village of Takai, 80km east of Kano city, and publicly give his own two-month-old daughter a dose of the controversial oral polio vaccine.
“We are fully prepared to vaccinate four million children in five days. We have enough people and enough vaccines to achieve that target,” said Dr Sani Jibril, deputy director of disease control in Kano’s health ministry.
Since Kano began resisting the UN’s global campaign to prevent polio, the state — an important trading centre in Nigeria’s arid mainly Muslim north — has seen the world’s fastest recorded outbreak of the disease to date.
More than 80% of the world’s cases are now in Nigeria, after 16 years in which campaigns using the same vaccine brought rates down and in some cases even wiped out the virus in former polio hotspots around the world.
UN health agencies and Nigeria’s federal government put pressure on Shekarau to drop the ban as polio cases began to pop up in 10 more African countries once thought safe, and are now ready to help Kano kickstart the campaign.
But the same Muslim hardliners who persuaded the Islamist governor to halt the campaign by alleging a United States-led plot to render African girls infertile through hormone-laced vaccines are still playing on families’ fears.
“As far as I’m concerned no cleric supports the polio vaccination,” said Muhammad Bn Uthman, the fiery imam who led the campaign against the vaccine from the pulpit of Kano’s Sahaba mosque.
“To our knowledge the polio vaccine contains substances that are harmful to children. We have empirical evidence to prove that,” he said.
“They can go ahead and launch the polio immunisation campaign, nobody says he will stop them, but all I have to say is that they can’t force anybody to immunise his child,” he warned.
The controversy has been stirred by the discovery of trace amounts of female fertility hormones in the vaccines distributed by Unicef and other international agencies.
Radicals like Bn Uthman allege that exposing female babies to these chemicals could leave them infertile in later life, a claim dismissed by international experts and now, after local tests, Kano’s own health officials.
“We collected all the reports on the tests conducted on samples of polio vaccine in South Africa, Indonesia as well as in Nigeria,” said Professor Sadiq Bashir Wali, head of a nine-man committee set up to probe the allegations.
“Our informed decision confirmed that the amount of the hormones is too small to cause any harm. These hormones are normal physiological items found in humans. They are also needed at birth to develop sexual organs.” — AFP