Nigeria has postponed its nationwide poliomyelitis immunisation programme for several months, after criticism by the country’s Muslim population of the safety of the vaccines being given to children. The move is ostensibly to allow time to resolve the controversy surrounding the immunisation exercise.
According to the press release signed by Wosilat Giwa, the director of communications and essential services of the national programme on immunisation, the exercise scheduled to have taken place from 22 to 25 May 2004, has been postponed until September 2004.
Although no reason was given for the postponement, it is believed that the action was taken because some states in the largely Muslim northern part of the country have refused to take part in the exercise.
"Over the last several months, concerns had been expressed by some groups of individuals and states on the safety of the oral polio vaccine, while some states suspended polio immunisation," said Stella Obasanjo, wife of Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo; she has been at the forefront of the campaign for polio immunisation.
The controversy over the vaccines was sparked when the Supreme Council for Sharia, one of the Muslim organisations in northern Nigeria asked the government to suspend the immunisation programme, claiming it had evidence to show that the vaccine contains substances that affect fertility.
The secretary general of the organisation, Dr Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, said that investigations by his organisation found that recently declassified US documents show that the United States had had a policy since 1975 of promoting the depopulation of African and Muslim countries.
He claimed that the documents showed that a hormone had been added to vaccines in anti-tetanus health campaigns in Nigeria, Tanzania, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Mexico.
He said: "The council harbours strong reservations on the safety of our population not least because of our recent experience in the Pfizer scandal, when our people were used as guinea pigs with the approval of the federal ministry of health and the approval of all the relevant UN agencies" (BMJ 2003;326:899).
Parents in northern parts of the country, influenced by some Muslim leaders and scholars, refused to allow their children to be vaccinated.
But Dr Abba Zakari, director of the primary healthcare programme in Jigawa state (one of several states in northern Nigeria with a high incidence of wild polio), said: "Nigeria is one of eight countries where polio immunisation is in danger of failing because of widespread refusals in the northern region."
Attempts by the Nigerian government to examine the safety of the vaccines in Nigeria, South Africa, and India ended in confusion, however, as some Muslim leaders refused to accept the results, claiming that they could not trust the government on this issue.
A few governors in some northern states have even said that they would prefer to import their own vaccines from Muslim countries to ensure the safety of their people.