DAR AL ISLAM - PAKISTAN: DOCTORS TRYING TO IMMUNIZE AGAINST POLIO KILLED BECAUSE THE IMMUNIZATIONS ARE MEANT TO STERILIZE MOSLEMS

Islamist militants claim vaccines are US plotBy Isambard Wilkinson in Peshawar

A doctor was killed by a roadside bomb in Pakistan today as Islamist militants tried to halt a polio immunisation campaign which, they say, is an American plot to sterilise Muslims.

Dr. Abdul Ghani was killed and three guards wounded after he visited a mullah, or religious leader, in Salarzai, a village in Bajaur tribal region in the borderlands with Afghanistan.

"It was a remote-controlled bomb," said an intelligence official in Khar, Bajaur's main town. No one claimed responsibility for the attack.

Dr Ghani was killed while returning to Khar, where he was chief surgeon at the main hospital, after attending a tribal gathering to promote polio vaccinations.

Last month, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan's Northern Areas bordering Afghanistan refused to allow health workers to vaccinate their offspring against polio.

Radical mullahs claim the polio campaign is an American bid to reduce the world's Muslim population by spreading sterility. This message is carried on local radio stations and from the loudspeakers of some mosques.

Health experts say the risks of a polio epidemic have increased. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan last year, compared with 28 in 2005.

Waheed Khan, a government coordinator for the anti-polio drive in North West Frontier Province, said the authorities were trying to reason with the clerics. "We have launched a campaign to convince parents that polio vaccination has nothing to do with religion and it does not affect fertility, or the ability to produce children," said Mr Khan.

Unicef, which helps run the vaccination campaign, played down the impact of obscurantist preachers.

"It is a very small percentage [of the 5.8 million children targeted in NWFP] and these children missed vaccination for a variety of reasons - that the child was not at home, or had gone out to play," said Melissa Corkum, a Unicef spokesman.

But a WHO health worker said that 60 per cent of the refusals in North West Frontier Province were made on religious grounds - and the failure to vaccinate in all areas would cause the disease to spread.

Muslim clerics in northern Nigeria spread the same message in 2003. They managed to halt all vaccinations in Kano state for about one year. By the time they resumed, 257 children had been paralysed and polio had spread into two neighbouring countries.


The kindest thing that the West can do for the world is to cut all ties with the moslem world and we should begin by developing new technologies and delivery systems (oils/fuels that would take the place of crude & could potentially be delievered via the infrastructure we have now) that would stop us from needing their oil...


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1) Islamist militants claim vaccines are US plot