Nigerians see U.S. menace in vaccine

LAGOS, Nigeria - Squeezing drops into the mouths of tearful toddlers, health workers launched an emergency drive Friday to vaccinate Nigerians against polio as a spreading outbreak threatened worldwide efforts to eradicate the disease.

Teams raced to immunize 15-million African children at immediate risk - a four-day effort impeded by rumors among Muslim fundamentalists that the vaccine was part of a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and render Muslims infertile.

"The Western world has never wished Muslims well," said Yakubu Husseini, 20, a teacher coming out of Friday prayers in the northern city of Kano. "Why should they expect us to believe that vaccines they make these days are not another frontier to wage war against Muslims?"

Three predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria - Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara - have either delayed or refused permission for the vaccination drive, with Zamfara demanding proof the vaccine is safe, something U.N. officials say has been supplied.

Many Muslim families in the conservative north had warned health officials they would refuse vaccinations for their children.

Muslims and Christians in Nigeria's south have largely embraced the program, and the main problem there is a lack of vehicles, drugs, storage equipment and volunteers, said Caroline Akosile, a U.N. Children's Fund official.

Polio usually infects children under the age of 5 through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, wasting muscles, deformation and, in some cases, death.

Failure of previous vaccine initiatives in northern Nigeria have aided the disease's spread internationally, recently leading to the crippling of nearly a dozen children in at least four other West African nations - Ghana, Togo, Niger and Burkina Faso - according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

Nigeria has 192 known cases, several of them in Lagos state, where the disease was thought to have been wiped out.

Immunization campaigns have slashed the number of countries where poliovirus is still breeding to seven - Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia. Ninety-nine percent of all new polio cases in the world are in Nigeria, Pakistan and India.

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