Parents refuse polio vaccine

2004-08-04 07:37

Kano - A renewed drive to immunise Nigerian children living amid the world's worst outbreak of polio has run into fierce opposition from parents and Islamic teachers, health workers have said.

As the five-day campaign, launched on Saturday to great fanfare, approached its end, officials in the northern city of Kano admitted they would not hit its target of vaccinating four million under-fives against the crippling disease.

"I worked on Saturday and Sunday but nobody I met would allow me to vaccinate his child. The first day I went to 16 houses and at each house I was rebuffed by the parents," said auxiliary health worker Shamsuddeen Falalu.

"In some of the houses I was told it was in my own interest never to come back and wherever I passed carrying the polio kit I was booed by children who followed me chanting derisive songs," the 18-year-old said on Tuesday.

Accusations of anti-fertility

In August last year, Kano State halted its participation in a United Nations-led global campaign to eradicate polio through mass immunisation after some Islamic radical leaders accused the United States of lacing the vaccine with anti-fertility agents.

The region rapidly found itself at the epicentre of the fastest growing outbreak of the disease ever recorded and cases began to spread across Nigeria -- Africa's most populous country with 130 million people -- and beyond.

On Saturday, Kano's Governor Ibrahim Shekarau announced that local tests on a new batch of vaccine imported from Indonesia, a mainly-Muslim country, had proved the treatment safe. He called on families to protect their kids.

But this week health workers found that much suspicion remains.

In the rural community of Kura, 20km outside Kano, vaccination worker Saadiya Bello found some parents saying they feared the vaccine could infect the children with the HIV and Aids virus.

"I was shocked when parents told me not to immunise their children because the vaccine could make their children barren and also contains HIV virus. Some of them were rude to me, calling me an American agent," Bello said.

Kano State's information commissioner, Yusuf Garba, conceded that it had been ambitious to expect the people of Kano to immediately embrace vaccination after the exposure for almost a year to conflicting messages over its safety.

"We know we can't meet the target of immunising four million children this time but if we can only achieve 35% coverage we are OK, and it means we are getting somewhere," Garba said.

Any further delays to successful vaccination in Nigeria will come as a severe blow to the UN eradication campaign, which still aims to stamp out polio once and for all by the end of the year.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organisation's chief official fighting polio said that Nigeria's renewed cooperation would be key. - AFP

- SAPA