Some among India’s poor refuse polio vaccine

GAYA, India – Gearing up for the final push to wipe out polio, India has run into a hurdle in an eastern state where poor, conservative communities are refusing to give polio drops to children because they distrust the medicine and its distributors.

The resistance could seriously hurt India’s chances of meeting a United Nations deadline for eradicating the potentially crippling disease globally by 2005.

Health workers dispensing polio drops in the slums of Gaya in Bihar have met resistance from slum dwellers who say the drops contain anti-fertility or impotency-inducing drugs and are part of government efforts to curb India’s burgeoning population.

“They feel it will reduce fertility of future generations,” Mahjabeen Anjum, a health worker participating in a special polio vaccination drive, said Friday.

Polio usually strikes children under age 5 through contaminated drinking water. It attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death.

India has reported 29 new polio cases this year, after 260 last year and 1,556 in 2002. Seven of the cases detected this year were in Bihar.

Sanjeeda Khatoon, a vegetable vendor and mother of nine, told the Associated Press she had not allowed health workers to give the polio preventive drops to her children.

“The government is more concerned with population control than the health of people,” Khatoon said. “Neither I, nor my mother, nor even my mother’s mother was immunized, yet none of us got polio.”

Savitri, a road sweeper who uses only one name, said: “I cannot trust these people. They belong to the enemy class.”

Health workers from UNICEF have recruited counselors to try to counter such concerns, Anjum said.

World Health Organization experts say even a single case of polio can result in a flare-up of the disease and prove a setback to the global aim of wiping out polio by 2005.

The city’s chief medical officer, Ramji Upadhyay, said there are only isolated incidents of resistance.

“By and large, the anti-polio campaign has been going on smoothly,” Upadhyay said.

Efforts to eradicate polio also stalled in Africa when a northern state in Nigeria banned inoculations after religious leaders alleged that foreign powers were spreading AIDS and infertility among Muslims with the vaccine. U.N. officials rejected the charge and said the vaccines were safe.

Nigeria’s Kano state – where a recent epidemic of the crippling disease started and spread to 10 other African nations – allowed vaccinations to resume last month after a nearly yearlong boycott.