Katsina State in northern Nigeria will jail any parents who refuse to allow health workers to vaccinate their children against the crippling polio virus, a senior official said on Friday.
Northern Nigeria is home to the world’s biggest remaining pocket of polio infections and resistance from Muslim families, who fear a plot to sterilise infant girls, has endangered a plan to eradicate the disease this year.
Abdullahi Garba Faskari, the state’s justice commissioner, said that the government would extend a law designed to enforce yellow fever jabs to cover the oral polio vaccine, which Nigerian and United Nations health workers are distributing.
”The government will henceforth arrest and prosecute any parent who refuses to have his child immunised against polio. Such a parent will get between six months and one year in jail without an option of fine,” Faskari said.
”In view of the baseless resistance by some parents … and the molestation of vaccinators by parents in some areas, the government feels duty bound to take measures that will bring this madness to an end,” he said.
”The refusal of some parents to immunise their children against polio is causing a serious setback in our fight to eradicate polio in our society and we will take any action necessary to change this attitude”, he explained.
Nigeria has almost two-thirds of the cases of polio in the world — 788 infants were paralysed by the crippling disease last year, more than twice as many as in 2003 — and is the main target for a global eradication campaign.
The United Nations World Health Organisation and the UN Children’s Fund Unicef are working with Nigerian officials to promote a series of massive immunisation drives designed to protect 15-million infants by the end of 2005. – Sapa-AFP