ABUJA, 29 January 2004 — Nigeria’s federal government said yesterday that it hoped to restart a drive to protect millions of children against polio within two weeks, after reassuring Muslim leaders that the vaccine is safe.
Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo also told reporters that the crippling disease had spread from Nigeria into neighboring countries after opposition from radical Muslims halted a mass immunization program.
Some Muslim scholars in Nigeria’s Islamic north have alleged that the vaccine has been laced with reproductive hormones as part of a Western-led plot to depopulate Africa, a claim denied by the World Health Organization.
Interviewed by AFP yesterday, some Muslim leaders and doctors said they still have concerns, but had agreed to conduct a new round of tests in collaboration with the government and the WHO.
Lambo said he had been in contact with Nigeria’s supreme Islamic body, the Jamatul Nasir Islam (JNI), which last week announced that its own expert tests had upheld allegations that the oral vaccine was polluted.
“We are in touch with the JNI and we are putting in place some arrangement whereby, over the next week or two, we will come together, undertake an arrangement together for once and for all,” Lambo said.
“We believe that within the next two weeks, we will be able to come together and announce to Nigerians that we have to move ahead with the polio campaign,” he said, following a weekly Cabinet meeting.
If Lambo’s move succeeds, it will come as an immense relief to international health officials, who had warned that a polio outbreak in Nigeria has endangered a worldwide drive to eradicate polio this year.
An official of Nigeria’s own National Program of Immunization told AFP that 328 young people were infected by polio last year in 23 of 36 states, focused around the northern city of Kano.
And Eyitayo confirmed that “some countries around us that were hitherto polio-free for two years have been re-infected by the strains of the polio virus from Nigeria, namely Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso and Ghana.”
Last year the WHO warned that delays in Nigeria’s immunization drive had put 15 million children in neighboring countries at risk and had endangered the success of a worldwide drive to eradicate polio.
But in Kano, now the epicenter of the world’s most deadly polio outbreak, the doubts of the Muslim scholars have been supported by an expert committee set up to test the vaccine.
Lawal Alassan Bichi, a pharmacologist who headed Kano State’s committee, said that his team had found the reproductive hormones oestrogen and progesterone in samples of the WHO’s oral vaccine.
But yesterday he told AFP that government and the WHO had argued that the amounts of contaminant detected in Kano’s tests were insignificant, and that his team had therefore agreed to support a new round of tests.
“A six-man committee has been set up to conduct another tests on the polio vaccines in and outside Nigeria with the hope that the outcome of the tests may be the final solution to the controversy,” he said.
“What we want is understanding, because nobody loves our children more than we do” he said, recalling that similar controversies have erupted during other vaccination drives around the world.
“We are doing this with the fullest sense of responsibility and knowing fully well the implication of our statements,” he insisted.
“Our dilemma is if we vaccinate our children with adulterated drugs we are doing them harm and if we refuse to vaccinate them on a false premise we are also doing them harm,” he said.
