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In my 1997 book , The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996) I wrote about Arab and Iranian phobias concerning the West seeking to infect them with diseases:

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Western colonialism stands accused of causing all "diseases rampant in the Arab lands." Specifically, the British imported cholera and malaria to Egypt after World War II. A British midwife who trained in the Kabylia province of Algeria got accused by his angry Algerian supervisor of working in league with the "white-coated saboteurs passing their hands from vagina to vagina, infecting my heroic people with syphilis!" An unnamed enemy�presumably American�infiltrated deadly diseases into Iraq via maggot-ridden cigarettes. Israel transmitted cancer to Palestinians by getting them to take dangerous factory jobs or subjecting them to phosphorous searches. It also smuggled irradiated fruit into Egypt to cause cancer.

AIDS, combining sex and disease, prompts recurring nightmares. Jerusalem hires young Jewish women infected with AIDS to spread the affliction in Egypt. One article in the Egyptian press focuses on an Israeli named Sarah who cavorted in luxurious apartments and infected the young and the prominent, while other versions count between 20 and 327 infected Israeli agents. The most imaginative account conjures up a "special formula" of the AIDS virus that infected sexual partners without in any way affecting the Israeli female carriers.

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With this background it comes as less than a total shock to learn from an important article in today's Baltimore Sun by John Murphy that the Muslims of northern Nigeria suspect that the polio vaccines being offered them gratis are in fact "contaminated with an anti-fertility agent that would sterilize their children or perhaps infect them with the AIDS virus, all part of an American plot to depopulate the developing world." Murphy tells this shocking anecdote from the village of Fanisau, Nigeria:

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In January last year, Nigerian health workers knocked on [Halima] Umar's door, offering her newborn daughter a free dose of polio vaccine. Two drops of the oral polio vaccine taken at least three times as a child, the health workers told her, would protect her daughter, Zaliha, from the crippling virus for life. But Umar turned the vaccinators away. Most of her neighbors did the same, some hiding children under their beds.

They had heard a rumor circulating through the hot, dusty villages of northern Nigeria that the vaccine had been contaminated with an anti-fertility agent that would sterilize their children or perhaps infect them with the AIDS virus, all part of an American plot to depopulate the developing world. The villagers believed it. It didn't matter that the World Health Organization, the Nigerian government and dozens of doctors and scientists dismissed the allegations as baseless, assuring the public that the vaccine taken by 1 billion children worldwide is safe. "We just didn't like the vaccine," says Umar.

During the following three months, vaccinators returned to Umar's neighborhood two more times to immunize the children. On both occasions, the shy 22-year-old mother politely but firmly declined their offer. Then in June, 10-month-old Zaliha developed a fever and diarrhea. Zaliha, who had recently learned to crawl, suddenly could no longer sit up. A few days later, paralysis, polio's damning trademark, arrived, leaving her legs limp and lifeless. �

Standing in her doorway on a recent morning, holding her crippled daughter, she expresses no regret. Asked if she would accept the vaccine if she could wind the clock back to that day health workers first knocked on her door, she does not hesitate with her answer. "No," says Umar, shaking her head. "I would do the same."

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On other occasions, villagers have "chased, threatened and assaulted vaccinators. Frustrated, some vaccination teams dumped thousands of doses of the vaccine rather than face angry villagers" and three northern Nigerian states canceled immunization campaigns last year.
Ali Guda Takai, a WHO doctor, explains the logic: "What is happening in the Middle East has aggravated the situation. If America is fighting people in the Middle East, the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims." Indeed, the number of polio cases has increased sharply with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: 9 in 2001, 54 in 2002 and 74 in the first 11 months of 2003.
The source of the problem lies with the doctors, imams, political leaders and professors who endorse the conspiracy theory. They are led by Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, a physician and president of Nigeria's Supreme Council for Sharia Law. Ahmed, 68, says of Americans, "They are the worst criminals on Earth to sterilize children for life. Even Hitler was not as evil as that."
Not only does this conspiracy theory harm Nigerian children like Zaliha, but it has worldwide consequences, obstructing a $2 billion-effort to eradicate polio. So long as it lives on in northern Nigeria, it lives on everywhere: "All it takes is for someone to hop on an airplane ... to start reinfecting another part of the world," notes the epidemiologist David Heymann. Chalk up one more tragedy to the baneful influence of conspiracy theories. (January 4, 2004).

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Never wait for manners to come from heaven, you must seek it"

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Hail Biafra


[ February 09, 2004, 07:05 PM: Message edited by: Waypoint1Biafra ]