Nigerian State to Lift Ban on Polio Vaccine

The northern Nigerian state of Kano is preparing to reverse its boycott of polio inoculations, which caused a resurgence of the crippling disease and threatened an international campaign to eradicate it.

Officials in Kano said they had received a "safe" batch of polio vaccines which had been manufactured in the predominantly Muslim country of Indonesia and was therefore deemed by Nigerian Muslims to be free of contamination.

In August last year Kano boycotted the World Health Organisation (WHO) vaccination campaign against polio because some Muslim clerics had warned that the vaccines were tainted and would make women sterile. Rumours spread that the vaccines were a plot by the west to reduce the number of Muslims.

Kano has bitter rivalries between its Islamic and Christian populations. Last week several hundred people died in sectarian clashes there.

Three other mainly Muslim Nigerian states, Niger, Bauchi and Zamfara, also refused the inoculations, but following assurances from President Olusegun Obasanjo and Muslim leaders that there was no cause for alarm, they joined the immunisation campaign.

Kano, however, continued to insist that the vaccines were dangerous. The boycott left the state prone to polio and the disease spread from there.

Nigeria now accounts for two-thirds of the world's polio cases and the disease has reached nine other African countries, according to figures released yesterday by the WHO in Geneva. Thousands of children have been paralysed by the outbreak.

But Kano is prepared to use the Indonesian-made drugs, provided they pass tests.

"If the outcome of the tests is positive, the vaccination campaign will start immediately, as we have been left behind," a Kano government spokesman, Sule Yau Sule, told BBC News Online.

The WHO welcomed the news as it opened a week-long conference in Geneva to re-evaluate its chances of eradicating polio worldwide by the end of the year.

Nigeria's health minister, Professor Eyitayo Lambo, pledged that the Nigerian government was ready to help Kano "catch up" with its immunisation campaign.

Mr Obasanjo assumed emergency powers to govern the central state of Plateau yesterday, saying recent killings there threatened to plunge the whole country into crisis.

About 1,000 people have been killed in fighting between Christians and Muslims which began as a land dispute but turned into a religious conflict as it spread.