The Nigerian city at the epicenter of the world's most dangerous outbreak of polio will boycott the UN' vast new drive to eradicate the crippling disease once and for all, officials said on Sunday.
The UN children's agency immediately warned that opposition from Muslim leaders to polio vaccination would lead to many more children being left disabled and undo the successes of a 16-year-old global immunization drive.
PHOTO: AP
"Any delay in immunization activities will result in the wider spread of the virus, crippling more innocent children in Nigeria and in neighboring countries," UNICEF spokesman Gerrit Beger said.
UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a campaign to immunise 60 million children in west and central Africa as part of a global drive to stamp out the polio virus before the end of the year.
Immunization teams will distribute oral vaccine in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Niger, Togo and in those areas of Nigeria ready to accept the program.
But the government of the northern Nigerian city of Kano -- where Muslim leaders have alleged that the oral vaccine is laced with chemicals designed to render African girls infertile -- told reporters it would not take part.
Kano's decision is critical to the success of the vaccination drive, as the teeming trading center has been traced as the source for a polio outbreak which has spread to at least seven formerly safe countries, health officials said.
"Kano State Government has resolved to continue with the suspension of the polio vaccination exercise until the issue [of the vaccine's safety] is resolved," said state spokesman Sule Ya'u Sule.
Polio immunization was suspen-ded in Kano and some other areas of mainly-Muslim northern Nigeria last year, after radical clerics began preaching that the drive was part of a US-led plot to depopulate Africa.
The WHO and UNICEF have dismissed the claims.
"UNICEF has been immunizing children around the globe for decades and our biggest wish is to continue to do the job of eradicating polio once and for all in Nigeria and worldwide," Beger said.
Beger warned that Kano's suspicion could "reverse the tremendous gains that have been made by UNICEF and its partners in reducing global cases of polio from 350,000 in 1988 to less than 1,000 in 2003."
Despite the international consensus that the vaccine is safe, last month opponents of the scheme got an unexpected boost when Kano's government reported finding traces of fertility hormones in a test sample of the oral vaccine.
Nigeria's federal government conducted its own tests, which found the vaccine safe, and international experts criticized Kano's findings, pointing out that the small amounts of estrogen found did not constitute a risk.
"You can find small amounts of these things even in tap water," one said.
Nigeria's federal government has now sent two expert committees to test samples of the vaccine in laboratories abroad -- in India and South Africa -- in a bid to convince doubters in the north that the vaccine is safe. But Kano State officials said they were annoyed at being excluded from one of the two missions and insisted that their own tests were valid.
"What we are saying is that since the vaccines in use have been found to be contaminated we need these donor agencies to bring new consignments, which we will test," Sule said.
"If we find them to be safe, we will gladly continue the exercise," he promised.
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