16:15 08/06/2015
Sumaila - Health workers move from door to door in the rural
Sumaila district of Kano state,administering oral polio vaccines to
children under five.
It could be any other vaccination drive but
the programme has extra importance in Nigeria, where there has not been a
case of the virus since July 24 last year.
As the one-year
anniversary approaches without a case, health officials are keen to keep
it that way. If successful, Nigeria will be taken off the list of
polio-endemic countries.
Fauziyya
Ahmed scribbles a code with chalk on the door of a house that she and
her team have just visited to indicate the children are now immunised.
"So far we have not encountered any resistance from parents in all the homes we have visited," she told AFP.
"People
now accept the polio vaccine as safe for their children, unlike in the
past, when parents were hostile to vaccinators and would call them
names."
Aggressive battle
They
weren't only called names. In February 2013, eight unknown gunmen
opened fire on two polio clinics in Kano, killing nine women
vaccinators.
Between 2003 and 2004, Kano state suspended polio
immunisation for 13 months, after some Muslim clerics and doctors
claimed the vaccine was a US-led Western plot to depopulate Africa.
Similar claims have been made in the world's two other polio-endemic countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In
all three, that and Islamist extremist violence from the likes of Boko
Haram and the Taliban have hindered vaccination efforts, allowing the
virus to re-emerge.
Laboratory analysis both inside and outside
Nigeria has declared the vaccine safe but public health officials and
international agencies have faced a battle ever since to convince
parents.
Their aggressive fight with the help of organisations such as the Gates Foundation and Rotary International has paid off.
In
2009 there were 338 recorded cases of polio in Nigeria but there were
only six last year, according to World Health Organization surveillance
data.
Local leaders
In Kano
state, work to combat polio has included using the latest satellite
technology to track teams of vaccinators and determine the areas
covered.
Influential religious and community leaders were also
brought in to help persuade parents to give their children the jab, said
health education officer Ahmed Sule Hungu.
Public information
films were shown illustrating the debilitating effects of polio, which
includes paralysis, permanent disability and death.
Health workers used the distribution of nutritional supplements to persuade parents to have their children inoculated.
Murtala
Yahaya, 47, had his two children vaccinated after watching the film
while 52-year-old Umar Sallau said he was convinced because of the
involvement of clerics and traditional chiefs.
"I didn't trust
polio vaccines because I was told it was not safe for children," said
Sallau, from Rimi village, 20 kilometres (13 miles) from Sumaila.
"But
when I heard clerics advising people to allow their children to be
immunised and I saw our traditional chief publicly giving polio drops to
his child, my view on polio vaccines changed.
"If polio vaccines
were not safe, our clerics would not advise us to use it for our
children and our traditional leaders would not have given it to their
own children."
Bargaining chip
Vaccinators
still face challenges, stemming from the priority the local authorities
have placed on polio at the expense of treatment for other prevalent
conditions such as malaria.
"This was why some of us rejected it
in protest but now that they include other much-needed drugs, we accept
it," said housewife Laraba Maikudi from Gidan Sidi village, as her
three-year-old daughter received the polio jab.
Two hundred metres
away, two health workers were sitting under a huge baobab tree,
examining sick children and dispensing drugs for free.
"This is
part of the incentives to make them accept the polio vaccine because
they complain the government is always concerned about polio," said one
health worker, without giving his name.
Resistance to the vaccine
is also used as a bargaining chip to force the state government to
provide much-needed but scarce social services.
People in remote
Dagora village in Sumaila district for example demanded an access road
in exchange for allowing in the vaccinators.
"Resistance is no
longer about ignorance... but is as a result of social frustration
created by lack of basic amenities, especially lack of healthcare
facilities in public hospitals," said Danjuma Al-Mustapha, a monitoring
and evaluation officer with the UN children's fund in Kano.
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