Authorities Fear Polio's Return to India

Health authorities in north India struggling with an outbreak of polio are asking Muslim leaders to support immunization drives, officials said Wednesday.

Officials in poverty-battered Uttar Pradesh state registered 254 cases of polio between Jan. 1 and Sept. 1 this year _ accounting for nearly all of India's 283 cases.

Particularly worrying: some 69 percent of the cases detected in Uttar Pradesh were among Muslims.

Rumors have swept the state's sizable Muslim population for years, particularly among the poor and illiterate, that the polio vaccine is actually a form of birth control and part of a Western plot to reduce the Muslim birth rate.

Polio usually infects children under age 5 through contaminated drinking water. The virus attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy and deformation and, in some cases, death. However, the disease can be prevented through doses of a vaccine delivered to infants and toddlers as oral drops.

Ahmad Hasan, the state's health minister, said health authorities are seeking the help of Muslim clerics to dispel the birth control myth.

"In Muslim dominated regions, clerics were asked to inaugurate the ... polio campaign. We believe this should help in dispelling the fear from the Muslim psyche," Hasan said.

Fueling such fears in India are local newspapers that repeat the myth as fact, and posters that have gone up around Muslim towns telling people not to let their children get vaccinated.

"Health workers are beaten and denied entry in Muslim dominated areas which has adversely affected the anti-polio drive," Dr. Mukesh Sharma, a senior health official, told The Associated Press in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.

There were 1,831 cases registered around the world in 2005, according to the World Health Organization, most in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Before 1988, when WHO launched a global anti-polio campaign, there were more than 350,000 cases.