Last week’s outbreak of the bird flu in South-East Asia succeeded in making as a mere footnote in the international media , the alarm raised by the World Health Organization (WHO) at about the same time, that new outbreak of polio (cerebral spinal meningitis) in Nigeria which had spread to about seven West African countries represent a serious health danger not only to the West African region but the possibility of triggering a global epidemic.

But a world devastated last year by the highly contagious SARS epidemic paid closer attention to events in South East Asia. Not even the media spin that claimed most of the victims of the present epidemic, largely in Islamic northern Nigeria refused government vaccines imported from the western world ,alleging the vaccines were laced with other deadly poisons meant to depopulate the moslem community in Nigeria as part of a broader western world strategic calculations in the global war against terrorism could give prominence to the story.

The Nigerian government reported resolve to go ahead with its immunization campaign to contain the epidemic, was met with frustration as the persons affected refused to get immunized when they can and others in order to escape immunization embarked on cross-border migration through Cameroon and across other West African neighboring countries like Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Liberia and Ivory Coast raising a regional alarm and outcry from the governments of these countries and WHO.

Given the usual passion associated with any otherwise political or health issue with religious colouration in Nigeria ,a country evenly divided in population by Moslems and Christians, it becomes very difficult to summarily dismiss this sequence of events as an after-thought. After-all, it was only last year that we saw the country almost torn-apart by violent religious riots over an innocuous newspaper article on Miss World beauty pageant opposed as immoral by a sizeable population of Nigerian moslem community.

More recently a state of the federation in northern parts of the country was taken over by a band of religious zealots, the so-called Nigerian Talibans advocating violent introduction of the Taliban-style government in an otherwise secular state like Nigeria. Earlier, the international media was awash with several reports of possible death by stoning of young Moslem Nigerian girls caught-up in the legal tango of shariah courts in Northern Nigeria for offences ranging from adultery to fornication.

But focusing on this religious argument will be a complete negation of the history of polio outbreaks in Nigeria and a disservice to the victims of this otherwise treatable and preventable disease. It is a shame on successive Nigerian governments that the country remains one of the few places in the world where polio is still prevalent inspite of the huge investment made so far towards its eradication. Indeed a closer look would reveal a pattern of government deceit and manipulation of polio victims which is at the heart of the present refusal of the victims to accept immunization and possibly explains repeated failures in attempts to curb the disease.

A celebrated Washington Post article in 2000 had revealed this sequence of betrayal of victims of the polio disease in Nigeria by both government and the multinational companies involved in its eradication. The paper had reported that in the wake of the 1996 polio outbreak in Kano that Pfizer international in collaboration with its Nigerian office and several Nigerian health institutions (both federal and local) used Trovan in a clinical trial of victims of the 1996 Kano epidemic without observing proper ethical medical steps. The report said Trovan which was not then approved by the United States Department for Food and Drug Administration (USDFDA) was surreptitiously administered on 200 patients,11 of whom died while others are still living with one form of deformity or the other.

The paper had said about 90 patients were initially administered the drug, out of which five died. Then for a proper comparative clinical study, Pfizer also administered another drug Ceftriasone on 97 others. Six more died from the group and others were deformed for life. In that same report, it was alleged Chloramphenicol Succinate, another drug banned in the U.S. and other western countries was also used with very severe fatality. The controversy generated by the report led to an investigation that revealed that Trovan already experimented on 7000 people worldwide was toxic. In the U.S. alone,100 deaths were recorded on account of this which led the USDFA to limit the use of the drug to hospitalized patients only.

While some will argue that 1996 is a long time for the effects of the fiasco to wear out on the populace, evidence to the contrary exists that most of the victims who survived the trauma had remained skeptical of several other initiative to ameliorate their plight, no matter how good intentioned and this unfortunately has affected the general attitude towards immunization and polio eradication program of the Nigerian government. And who can fault them when no official inquiry was established to investigate the incident and lay out a report for the public on what happened and ways to ensure that it never happens again.

Today there is no official record of the role played by the federal ministry of Health under Ikechukwu Madubuike as minister that supervised the entire clinical trials, nor do we know of the role played by the Kano State government and the University of Maiduguri where the tests were conducted. All these are public institutions sustained by the peoples tax money and must be held accountable. Even nobody knows the fate of the victims who survived and whether adequate compensations were paid. And yet we expect people from same region to quickly forget and jump on the boat when another box of so-called vaccines arrive, probably supplied by another so-called multinational pharmaceutical giant and the entire process supervised under the watchful eyes of Nigerian health officials.

Polio (cerebrospinal meningitis) outbreaks has proved very devastating for Nigerian children and youngmen as those mostly affected are persons between the ages of one to thirty. Already the so-called meningitis belt is expanding with each outbreak, with what use to be an isolated disease in few northern states, now encompassing almost all of northern Nigeria to include states in the south like Lagos, Enugu, Oyo, Cross-River etc. (about 23 states in all).

But more embarrassing is the report that the country is now exporting the disease to neighbours that had hitherto no history of the disease or part of the success story in its eradication where we had recorded an abysmal failure. And this is why all hands must be on deck in a renewed fight against the disease. Government and its agencies must think out a total campaign that will convince a justifiably angry and skeptical public that it means well and all associated operations conducted with the highest ethical and moral standards.

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