Polio-free at last
Nigeria marked its first year without a single case of polio on Friday,
reaching a milestone many experts had thought would elude it as internal conflict
hampered the battle against the disease”, The Guardian of London screamed in
its news report of July 24, 2015. For Nigeria, it has been a long, tortuous and
seemingly endless journey towards the eradication of a disease that leaves its
victims destitute of the streets of our country.
In the last two decades or more, we have had to deal with polio and
Lassa fever to their varying incidence and prevalence rates. It must be
stressed that during the decades the incidence and prevalence growths embarrassingly
showed our notoriously inadequate public health sector up as a classical
example of our governance failure. Thus, we made the list of countries of the
world with excess burden of diseases that had been eliminated elsewhere. Though
it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were also times we scored little successes
in containing transmission of infectious diseases, threatening public health
and spreading death, only for these diseases to reoccur in places where public
health facilities were lacking or public health managers were utterly
irresponsible. Take Lassa fever for instance: following the successful
containment of transmission in Lassa, Borno State in 1969, it took only a few
months of crass irresponsibility of our governing elites and the indolence of
managers of public health at the time for the disease to roll up itself and
reappear in Jos, Plateau State. We learned nothing in later years: the
experiences and knowledge gained were locked away by managers of the public
health of the state in cobwebbed drawers. While they fleeced resource
allocation for control and management of infectious diseases, the poor returned
to their old dirty habits and dirty ways of living in poor sanitary and dirty
environments to feed on rats, the resilient vectors for the contagious disease.
Like death, Lassa fever deviously carried its torch in search of victims in
urban slums and the sprawling dank caverns of the suburbia. There were deaths
as there were survivors who lived to tell the tales of agony and anguish.
The managers of our public health truly never placed a handle on polio,
“an acute viral disease characterized by inflammation of the nerve cells of the
brain stem and the spinal cord caused by a virus called poliovirus”, until
institutional framework was put in place and do-gooders, workers of the
Aid-Industrial Complex and compassionate billionaires like Melinda and Bill
Gates came along to help halt the scourge. It wasn’t smooth sailing. There were
bumps along the way; cultural and religious bumps shaped by long-held beliefs
of parents and fundamentalist clerics who gifted common sense to idiocy by
rejecting polio immunization. The criminality of drug manufacturing companies
like Pfizer was unhelpful. The Trojan experiment performed on children of Kano
who were suffering from meningitis created a cloud of suspicion. In all of this
the suspicion that mothers were being immunized to prevent them from enjoying
motherhood also grew, giving life to the lie that immunization was about birth
control. The criminality of a rogue drug manufacturer became the albatross of
the Aid-Industrial Complex.
The cloud of suspicion overhung Kano and beyond for a long time. No
wonder Mallam El-Rufai on becoming the Governor of Kaduna State had to publicly
administer polio jab on his son to the applause of those who witnessed what at
face value appeared as a symbolic gesture, an innocuous way of highlighting the
importance of immunization in the life of a child. But there is a point that
appears lost to the symbolism of Mallam’s action that suggests that suspicion
of immunization and modern science is still prevalent in northern Nigeria.
Mallam’s action has been unjustifiably dismissed by his critics in the social
media as sheer fantasy – the fantasy of the father administering jab on his son
in the patriarchal north. The criticism is simply that social gendering makes
it impossible for any “self-respecting” northern father to emulate Mallam
El-Rufai. His critics miss the point. Forget fantasy, representation is about
making the real very real; and by symbolizing what every father does, the
Kaduna Governor merely re-emphasized the love-love relationship between the
father and the son. Call the love-love relationship fantasy, representation,
symbolism, El-Rufai has shown the type of leadership that one expects northern
political leaders, traditional and religious rulers, clerics and parents to
emulate.
There is also a salient point to be made here about the contributions
of compassionate billionaires, Melinda and Bill Gates, to the eradication of
polio in Nigeria. Only recently joined by Dangote, they shame those billionaire
countrymen and women of ours who distance themselves from moral causes and the
problems that confront the poor of our country. The Gates, like the nine female
health workers who were killed during their polio immunization rounds at the
Filin Kashu and Shargalle Health Centres in Kano in 2013, have shown that they
are truly global citizens and true friends of Nigeria. A word for those brave
women who laid down their lives so that children of our country can live their
lives free of polio: we owe them an eternal debt of gratitude.
Until July 24, 2014 the last recorded cases of wild polio were from
five local government areas in Kano and Yobe states. In effect, July 24, 2015
marked a year without a single recorded case of fresh wild polio infection in
our country. Brilliant. This calls for celebration. However, here is the
science: “Poliomyelitis is expected to occur in a hundred percent of
susceptible children and more than ninety percent of susceptible adult
household contacts”; and the science also tells us that “polio is transmitted
through stool, contaminated food, water and by person to person contacts”.
Considering the poor sanitary conditions of cities and towns of our country,
the task of attaining godliness through cleanliness becomes the collective one.
We can only stay true to the science by staying clean, eating healthy and by
immunizing our children. The journey towards the eradication of polio which
began in 1997 is now at its terminal end, yes, we have reached the “milestone
many experts had thought would elude us”; but while we celebrate and scream,
“polio-free, free at last,” we should always remember that viruses have so many
invincible ways of conquering the human habitat.
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