Polio vaccine drive slated for Africa.
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| Fri, 02-20-2004 - 10:52am |
How can these leaders actually believe their lies thereby denying people this crucial protection?
Can't these leaders somehow be educated to the facts & benefits?
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2004/02/20/polio_vaccine_drive_slated_for_africa/
The World Health Organization will launch a massive immunization campaign Monday targeting 63 million children in about 10 African countries as a polio outbreak spreads from heavily Muslim northern Nigeria.
Islamic leaders in the heart of the Nigerian outbreak say they will uphold their ban on the polio vaccine, calling it part of a US plot to spread infertility or AIDS among Muslims.
Health workers say the five-month-old ban has spread the crippling disease back into seven African countries where it had been eradicated, and threatens a 16-year effort -- the world's largest public health project -- to eliminate the disease worldwide.
The 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 the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa.
"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. United Nations workers attribute a third of the cases to the vaccine ban in northern Nigeria.
Targeted countries 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.

