Polio and ‘Public Figures’
Here we have a media watch item. A rather strange one.
I noticed it late yesterday when I posted this item on the polio outbreak in Indonesia (dated today but I saw and posted it yesterday my time – today UK time). I noticed something missing that I was pretty sure I had seen in previous BBC articles on the subject – a paragraph on how the outbreak was thought to have started. Previous articles had, I thought, mentioned the fact that Muslim clerics in norther Nigeria had urged people not to get vaccinated (and not to vaccinate their children – with horrible results) because the vaccine was contaminated in a US plot. That item wasn’t in this latest article. Later yesterday, I listened to the World Service, which reported the same story. This time, the reporter did mention what was thought to be the origin, and did mention northern Nigeria, whereupon I listened very closely – to hear that ‘public figures’ had spoken against the vaccinations. Public figures – period. I was gobsmacked, and outraged. The BBC is now keeping it secret that polio is making a comeback when it had been nearly eradicated, because of stupid, destructive clerical behavior? Keeping it secret on the World Service, which could be listened to precisely by people who might very well need to know that? Why?? And how can they?!
Allen Esterson noticed the same lacuna, and emailed me about it, with links to further sources that were not as forthright as they ought to have been – including UN sources. He also emailed the BBC, he told me. Well, they may have paid attention. (Perhaps other people noticed and emailed too. One can hope.) The story has been updated, and the paragraph is now there.
The country was free of the disease for 10 years – but in March 2005 a 20-month-old boy in Java was infected. Since then more than 200 polio cases have been reported in the country. Officials believe the outbreak can be traced to Nigeria, where vaccinations were suspended in 2003 after radical clerics said they were a US plot.
I was right about having seen the paragraph in previous articles, I found – this one from July 22 for instance.
Okay, Beeb, well done for correcting it on the screen. Now, include it in World Service broadcasts too, okay? Never mind ‘offending’ people: this is life or death, paralysis or non-paralysis. Don’t mess around.
Ah yes. More benefits of “religion” to the world’s peoples.
On a related note: What do folks here know about the (peripherally related) mercury preservative issue in the United States? Panic-or was there indeed a rpoblem that we are seeing in the purported increase in Autism?
Mira, I know it’s old news, and there are news links on it at B&W going back a long time. But the omission of the key paragraph is new news!
Yeah, it is horrendously tragic. One of the articles I linked to a longish time ago talked about a (very poor, of course, rural) woman holding her paralyzed child and saying despairingly, ‘I didn’t know…’
She didn’t know. She believed what those bastards told her. Now she has to live with it for the rest of her life. Bastards!
And just so about the setback. Polio was nearly gone!
Bastards!
I am loath to mention it but Daniel Pipes has documented media evasion, esp on radio, like this quite well, esp by the NPR.In one case the cause was simply ascribed to ‘unfounded concerns over contaminated vaccines’ or something nice and vague like that.
Don’t want to embarass the fucking stupid and callous religious leaders do we? I feel so sorry for the poor families and their paralysed kids. Always the losers.
Ophelia emailed me that she at first failed to register that when the BBC News website updated their report from fears about the safety of the vaccinations to report opposition from “radical clerics” who feared a “US plot”, they still omitted to mention that the clerics were M—–s.
Mira writes concerning NPR having the same squeamishness about reminding people of the facts about the suspension of vaccination in northern Nigeria a couple of years ago:
>Don’t want to embarass the fucking stupid and callous religious leaders do we?< This isn’t about not wanting to embarrass “religious leaders” – do you think the BBC or NPR would avoid “embarrassing” the Catholic Church or religious Right in the States? It can only be about reticence about mentioning that the clerics were M—–s. The truth is spelled out at http://www.news-medical.net/?id=9808
>Almost two years after radical Islamic preachers in Nigeria influenced parents against having their children vaccinated against polio for fear it was part of a U.S. plot against Muslims, a Nigerian strain of the virus that causes the crippling disease has occurred as far away as Indonesia.
>Many residents in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city still refuse to have their children vaccinated, not just against polio but against other childhood diseases such as measles. Mustafa Balarabe a 37-year-old father of four said his children wouldn’t be vaccinated, citing “the general Western plot against Muslims worldwide” as the reason.< See also:
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20050510/01
But not the ever-PC New Scientist, 12 January 2005:
>The African epidemic has affected 13 previously polio-free countries. It stems from an outbreak in northern Nigeria which occurred after the state of Kano suspended polio immunisations in October 2003, alleging the vaccines were contaminated.<
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6870
Even when they’re more explicit in a recent article (19 August), their wording implies that “local rumours” led “Muslim elders” (“elders”??) to suspend the vaccination, rather than that the clerics themselves were the *source* of the “rumours”. And no mention of who were the alleged plotters.
>The deadly virus has re-infected several countries since the polio immunisation campaign was suspended by Muslim elders in three regions in northern Nigeria in October 2003 – local rumours suggested the vaccine was laced with reproductive hormones and HIV in a plot to depopulate Africa.<
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6870
Only marginally related, I know, but I’ve been amused/appalled to note that all the public officials from George Bush downwards who’ve commented on the tragic effects of the hurricane have recommended prayer as the answer to everyone’s problems. Nobody seems to have asked any of them why God felt it necessary to impose this test on his faithful in the first place.
It would seem to me, as a humble outsider, that rather than spending Wednesday in prayer people might be better off stacking sandbags, organising food, medicine and water for the stranded, etc. But what do I know?
Isn’t something similar happening in Uganda and across Africa generally where:
a) there are stories (allegedly) spread by Caotholic priests that condoms do not protect against AIDS, and
b) US aid is being diverted form straightforward public health programmes supplying condoms into religious exhortations to abstinence and chastity.
Where’s my secularism T-shirt?
a) there are stories (allegedly) spread by Catholic priests that condoms do not protect against AIDS
Not allegedly. Right up front. Vatican policy.
I suppose a double tragedy here is Africa has been continually refused access to the requesite amount of anti-viral drugs that can and ought to be cheaply cloned to help with aids, malaria and many more diseases – largely by giant pharmaceuticals firms using the WTO; but when the right drugs do eventually get through, they can be banned by African countires’ own (religeous) power elite for absolutely no good scientific reason. Goes without saying this is shockingy sad news for the majority of humanity.
And we seem to witness increasingly from the US that the ‘power of prayer’ is taking the place of, as commented above, genuinely useful helful activities, which involve dedication of resources, time, a genuine emotional commitment – and of course, money. This abdication of good governance works on just the same principle as the mindless, dictats of those increasingly powerful ‘radical’ Muslim clerics around the world.
When did this planet suddenly go into reverse, and who decided on our behalf ?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n17/print/pede01_.html
“Anti-Condescensionism”
Susan Pedersen
A review of:
“Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907” by Nadja Durbach Duke, 276 pp, £14.95
Actually, Allen, I think NPR does avoid offending the religious Right and especially the Catholic church here. I’ve been fuming for years at the astonishingly respectful, serious tone in which they always told us about the travels and interventions of the previous pope. They’re not quite so polite to the religious Right, I don’t think, but they’re nowhere near as forthright as they could be – and they have religious Right-wingers comment now and then, too. (The Catholic aspect is complicated, or influenced, by the perceived need not to ‘offend’ Hispanic listeners – which plays the same role here as the perceived need not to ‘offend’ Muslim [or, rather, from majority-Muslim countries] listeners in the UK. Either way, it’s seen as immigrant-bashing, xenophobic, racist, etc.)