Vaccine ban linked to polio revival

DAKAR, Senegal - The World Health Organization will launch a huge immunization campaign Monday targeting 63-million children in 10 African countries as a polio outbreak spreads from Muslim northern Nigeria.

Islamic leaders in the region at the heart of the Nigerian outbreak say they will uphold their ban on the polio vaccine, calling it part of a U.S. plot to spread infertility or AIDS among Muslims.

Health workers say that because of the 5-month-old ban, the crippling disease has returned to seven African countries where it had been eradicated. They say the ban threatens a 16-year effort - the world's single largest public health project - to eliminate the disease worldwide.

Monday's campaign launch will send hundreds of thousands of volunteers house to house to administer the oral vaccine, from arid Niger on the edge of the Sahara to the savannas of central Africa's Congo.

"Africa has had a tremendous success story" in eliminating polio, WHO spokeswoman Melissa Corkum said in Geneva. "It would be a shame if we let that slip."

As recently as the 1980s, polio twisted the limbs and endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and others around the world each year.

The global eradication campaign has since reduced its range to six nations, including Nigeria, Niger and Egypt in Africa. Fewer than 800 cases were reported last year worldwide. U.N. workers blame a third of the cases on the vaccine ban in northern Nigeria.

Countries targeted for the immunization campaign include Nigeria, where the northern state of Kano is one of the largest remaining reservoirs of the polio virus in Africa.

Islamic leaders in Kano and two other northern states say the international polio campaign is a U.S. plot to kill Nigeria's Muslims by spreading the AIDS virus or agents that cause sterility.

Kano state officials say their own lab tests have found estrogen and other female hormones in the vaccine.

Hoping to prove the vaccine's safety, Nigeria on Sunday dispatched a 12-member team of scientists, government officials and Muslim leaders to labs in South Africa, Indonesia and India to witness tests. The fact-finding team was due back late Thursday.

Influential Islamic leaders have rejected the mission's findings in advance.

"We'll not accept whatever result they bring back because the federal government is not sincere," Nasiu Baba Ahmed, secretary-general of the Supreme Council for the Implementation of Sharia in Nigeria, told the Associated Press.

"They went and hired some traditional rulers as members of the team. Are those traditional rulers scientists? How could they determine whether or not the vaccine is contaminated when they have no knowledge of science?" Ahmed asked.

"That is why we cannot accept whatever result they bring back from that trip."

Other countries targeted for the vaccinations are Ghana, Togo, Niger, Cameroon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast and Chad.

FULL NAME: Poliomyelitis.

CAUSE: Any one of three related enteroviruses: poliovirus types 1, 2 or 3.

VICTIMS: Any age, but more than half of cases are in children younger than 3.

INITIAL SYMPTOMS: Fever, fatigue, headaches, vomiting, constipation (or less commonly diarrhea), stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs.

EFFECTS: Paralysis, which is almost always permanent. Legs more commonly affected than arms, but quadriplegia can occur, and more extensive paralysis can kill through asphyxiation. Postpolio syndrome - commonly, progressive muscle weakness, severe fatigue and pain in muscles and joints - can appear 15 to 40 years after infection.

VACCINES: Inactivated vaccine, developed in 1955 by Dr. Jonas Salk; must be injected. Live attenuated oral vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin in 1961.

ERADICATED: Late 1950s and early 1960s in industrialized countries. Nigeria, India and Pakistan account for 98 percent of cases.

- World Health Organization

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