Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - May 27, 2004
Kano government spokesman Sule Ya'u Sule said the state will import directly vaccines from Indonesia and resume participation in a global immunization drive following the suspension, which U.N. officials have blamed for allowing polio to spread widely across Africa.
"Importation of the safe vaccines will be any time from now. I cannot give you an exact date at this moment but we will soon begin immunization," Sule told The Associated Press.
Kano officials last September suspended participation in the global immunization program aimed at wiping out polio, saying local scientists discovered traces of a hormone in foreign-made vaccines that they feared could make girls infertile.
U.N. officials rejected the charge and assured the vaccines were safe.
Some local Islamic leaders seized on the controversy, accusing Nigeria's government of being witting or unwitting participants in a U.S.-led plan to spread AIDS and render Muslim girls infertile.
Nigeria currently accounts for about 50% of all polio cases worldwide, federal Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo said.
Lambo said Kano's decision to drop the boycott would be followed by a massive nationwide immunization effort aimed at halting the disease's spread by the end of the year.
He told government-owned Radio Nigeria that Kano was being included in plans for a U.N.-backed immunization drive to eliminate the virus worldwide.
"Nigeria will shock all skeptics by halting the transmission of wild polio virus before the end of the year" now that "Kano is coming on board," Lambo said. "We have mapped it out ... (We) will just move forward."
African leaders complained that Nigeria was a stumbling block to achieving the goals of a $3 billion, 16-year global campaign to eradicate polio.
The plan has so far reduced cases of the disease from 350,000 in 1988 to fewer than 1,000 last year.
Kano's decision to return to the immunization campaign is "one of the most significant developments" in the polio eradication effort, said Bruce Aylward, Geneva-based coordinator of the U.N. World Health Organization's anti-polo initiative.
Aylward said meeting the target of ridding the world of polio before the end of this year would be a "tremendous challenge" because confidence in polio vaccines had been compromised in Nigeria, from where new cases had spread fivefold into western and central Africa.
"Community confidence has been terribly compromised and this has to be rebuilt right across from Chad to Senegal," he said.
Polio usually infects children under the age of 5 through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death.
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