A Nigerian Sultan Helps Gates Rethink His Polio Strategy
June 4, 2010 by thegreenchildrenfoundation · View Comments
In 2000, the picture of polio around the world looked pretty good: just 1,000 cases were reported that year. Bill Gates saw this as an opportunity: a chance to invest a little bit of his money and not just control a disease, but eradicate it.
Last year, though, that rosy picture looked both bleak and expensive. As Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization said, “There’s no way to sugar-coat the past 12 months.” During 2009, we saw a resurgence of polio in 20 countries — many of which had previously eradicated the disease.
The Gates/WHO strategy to fight polio was based on the success of the 1979 smallpox vaccine campaign. In this campaign, though Bangladesh was seen as a last stronghold of the disease, the virus was finally eliminated when a policy of forced vaccination was implemented (which many consider a human-rights abuse). The polio campaign used a similarly simple playbook: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. And for awhile, it seemed that strategy might work. Now, though, it’s failing. Like the case of smallpox, polio is still deeply entrenched in one place: Nigeria. The country made up half of the world’s polio cases last year, in part due to rumors that have circulated about how the vaccine induces sterility, and in part because of the risk of Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis, which causes paralysis in about one in a million people who receive the oral polio vaccine.
That’s where the Sultan of Sokoto, ruler of 70 million Muslims living in northern Nigeria, comes in.
