Religious zealotry and misinformation have coerced villagers in the Muslim north of Nigeria into refusing polio vaccinations and led to the re-emergence of polio just a few years after it nearly joined smallpox on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of eradicated diseases.
Before beginning my freelance career, I worked as a staff photographer for eleven years on the award-winning staff of The Washington Times. While the bulk of my daily assignments focused on covering Congress, political campaigns and The White House, my true photographic calling was, and continues to be, documenting the humanitarian struggle of people around the world. I became interested in this story when I discovered that although the last case o polio in the United States was in 1978, I was shocked to discover that polio is wreaking havoc in northern Nigeria. I spent several weeks in Kano, Nigeria documenting the lives of adults and children crippled from polio and the effects of a religious ban on the vaccine.
Polio is a highly infectious virus that cripples those children it does not kill. In 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it had contained polio to three countries and was close to eradicating it. An unprecedented, sustained and multibillion-dollar global effort had confined the virus to Nigeria, Pakistan and India, and WHO was closing in on victory.
But it didn't happen that way.
A vaccine to eradicate polio became a line in the sand for Muslim clerics. Religious zealotry and misinformation coerced villagers in the Muslim north of Nigeria into refusing polio vaccinations and led to the re-emergence of polio just a few years after it had nearly joined smallpox on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of eradicated diseases.
The governor of Kano state, Sheik Ibrahim Shekarau, banned the polio vaccine, saying that the U.N. vaccine was part of a larger Western conspiracy: It was better to lose a dozen children now than to raise a generation of sterile women and AIDS-infected men. Over the next four years, more than 3,000 of Nigeria’s unprotected children were infected with polio, and the contagion spread. By 2006, WHO reported, more than 3,000 children were crippled by polio and more than 20 countries reinfected with the Nigeria strain of the virus.
But now, global authorities think they have one last, best chance to conquer this disease. Gov. Shekarau has reversed himself, declaring his support for a new polio vaccine. Immunization campaigns are back on the streets, administering the polio vaccine drop by drop.
As Muslim suspicion of the polio vaccine lingers, Nigeria is coping with hundreds of polio survivors, children and now young adults who are crippled or paralyzed, and the continuing Muslim-Christian friction in Africa's most populous and potentially unstable nations.