Maiduguri - An emergency polio vaccination campaign aimed at
reaching 25 million children this year has begun in parts of Nigeria newly
freed from Boko Haram Islamic extremists, with fears that many more cases of
the crippling disease will likely be found.
Two
toddlers discovered last month were Nigeria's first reported polio cases in
more than two years, putting the world on alert just months after the African
continent was declared free of the disease.
One
member of the Rotary Club's "End Polio Now" drive said he almost
cried when he got the news. It was a major blow to global efforts to stamp out
polio, which persists in only two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The
Associated Press joined the vaccination drive in northeastern Nigeria, a
campaign going to extraordinary lengths to fight the disease in areas still
threatened by Boko Haram extremists who violently oppose Western medicine.
Health
workers using military helicopters, all-terrain vehicles and even tricycle
taxis vaccinated about 1.5 million children in the past week alone, starting in
the refugee camps where the new cases surfaced.
Insecurity
The
World Health Organisation has said the two new cases indicate the wild polio
virus has been circulating for five years in northeastern Borno state, where
Boko Haram began its uprising in 2009.
More
cases are expected to surface as Nigeria's military forces Boko Haram out of
more towns and villages, said Dr Tunji Funsho, head of Rotary's polio
eradication drive.
Just 20
years ago, this West African nation was considered the world's epicenter of
polio, recording 1 000 cases a year. Men and women with twisted limbs crawling
along the roadside to beg are still a common sight. A global drive to end polio
began in 1988, when the highly contagious disease was endemic in 125 countries.
Though
progress has been made, wiping out polio probably will not be possible without
ending the unrest tied to Islamic extremism that prevents vaccination in the
three countries where the virus still is endemic, according to a new report
from US-based risk analysis group Stratfor.
"Boko
Haram is largely responsible for the insecurity that has hamstrung vaccination
efforts in Nigeria," the report said. "Though the group has weakened
since the start of 2015 ... as long as this security risk remains, so, too,
will the risk that Nigeria's latest run-in with polio will not be its
last."
Boko
Haram is in retreat but remains deadly. In July, militants attacked a
humanitarian convoy near Maiduguri, the region's largest city, leading the
United Nations to suspend aid to newly liberated areas where it says half a
million people are starving.
Major setback
Boko
Haram's opposition to all things Western reached new heights in 2013 when
militants shot and killed nine women vaccinating children against polio in
northern Kano, Nigeria's second largest city.
Over the
years, the vaccination campaign has had to fight rumors that the vaccine was a
plot to sterilise Muslims, which it overcame by winning over religious and
traditional leaders and grassroots women's groups.
"Yes,
it's a major setback, but we are not defeatist," Funsho declared of the
latest cases. He looked over a map of Borno state that showed only a small
southern section as "accessible," most of the sprawling state
"partially accessible" and a band in the north bordering Niger,
Cameroon and Chad as "inaccessible" because of Boko Haram fighters.
Over the
past week, hundreds of health workers from the government, the United Nations
and aid organizations spread out across Borno state, delivering the
vaccinations through drops on the tongue.
Military
armored cars and truckloads of soldiers guarded trips into precarious areas.
They included the town of Chibok, where nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped
in April 2014, shocking the world. More than 200 remain missing. Boko Haram
extremists attacked a village near Chibok last week, killing 11 people.
For
areas too dangerous to reach by road, helicopters delivered vaccines to already
trained people on the ground, to avoid suspicion of strangers, said Rotary
field coordinator Aminu Muhammad.
Massive campaign
"We've
even been able to reach a couple of areas that we had been told by the military
were inaccessible, after community leaders informed us we could get
through," Muhammad said proudly.
"Still,
there were some major communities outside the metropolitan areas that we were
unable to reach," Muhammad said.
He could
not estimate costs for the massive campaign because organizations like the US
Centres for Disease Control, the UN children's agency and London-based Save the
Children all are participating with their own budgets.
Most
vaccinators are women because men traditionally are not allowed into the home
of a Muslim woman if her husband is absent.
One
campaign member, Maryam Kawule of the Core Group, led green-veiled young women
ticking off family names handwritten in an exercise book. "We do the
preliminary work of counting the children, and we're here now to ensure every
kid under 5 gets his or her vaccination," she said.
It
doesn't end there. The polio vaccine has to be administered at least three
times to each child, and up to five times in endemic areas, so more rounds are
planned next year.
