KANO — THE Kano State Government has told local opinion-formers that tests it conducted on oral polio vaccines have proved it is safe for distribution to children, delegates at a stakeholders’ meeting said.
Although a spokesman for the state government refused to reveal the results of tests conducted by local medical experts — saying only that an official statement would be made “very soon, perhaps by the end of the week” — some of those at the meeting said they expected immunisation to restart rapidly.
“From the way the issues were discussed at the meeting, the government may have agreed to restart the exercise,” said Kano businessman Ta’ambu Abdullahi, one of a group of influential figures invited by the state government to review its tests on the vaccine.
The densely populated city of Kano is at the centre of the world’s largest and fastest growing outbreak of the polio virus, a contagious disease which strikes infants under six years old and often leaves them crippled.
Last year influential Muslim preachers in the region alleged that vaccines distributed by United Nations’ health agencies to combat the disease were laced with chemicals designed to leave African girls sterile, as part of a US-led plot to depopulate the continent.
Governor Ibrahim Shekarau banned all immunisation work and commissioned a series of expert committees to conduct their own tests and to seek out a new source of “safe” drugs from a Muslim Asian country. International health experts dismissed the allegations and condemned the ban, warning that polio has now spread from Kano to re-infect African countries once free of the disease and has undermined attempts to eradicate the illness worldwide by the end of the year.
But Abdullahi Saleh Pakistan, an Islamic preacher who attended yesterday meeting said that most of his fellow clerics on the panel have been convinced by the local tests conducted on a batch of vaccine imported from Indonesia that the drugs were safe.
“From what we were told at the meeting, the committee said that polio vaccines to infertility ratio has been exaggerated, and it cannot cause harm to mothers. Almost all the Ulema (Muslim scholars) at the meeting are convinced of the need to urgently restart polio vaccination,” he said.
The businessman, Abdullahi, agreed. “Even though I did not understand most of the medical jargon of the committee, I’m convinced that the polio vaccination should go on,” he told AFP. However, despite the enthusiasm of those at the meeting, a spokesman for Shekarau refused to release the results of the nine-man medical committee’s study of the test results or to give his government’s reaction to them.
“The stakeholders were adequately briefed ... on the implications of the polio vaccine and comments were invited. The government will now very soon make an official pronouncement on its stance,” spokesman Sule Ya’u Sule said.
“I don’t want to be specific, but it’s possible the pronouncement might be made by the end of the week. We have never said we will never be part of polio immunisation. We only suspended it to verify complaints of contamination of the vaccine,” he added.
Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation and the UN children’s agency UNICEF said that with 257 cases, Nigeria now accounts for more than three quarters of all the new polio infections in the world. Forty-four new cases of polio believed to be linked to the Kano outbreak have been recorded elsewhere in West Africa in regions once thought safe from the disease, the agencies said.
