If you were out in Bangalore around midnight on Sunday, the sheer number of vehicles, mainly autorickshaws, on the road; and the traffic jams would have puzzled you. It was as if anyone with a baby was rushing to the nearest hospital.

The Times of India)

Scene outside Bowring Hospital, Bangalore. (Source: The Times of India)

It was the National Immunization Day. Little ones, mainly those under 5 were given oral polio drops. Till evening everything was normal. As sun set, rumours began spreading that a few children had died. Some even said 300 children had died! The situation led to violence at many places.

Earlier in the day, a similar thing was getting enacted in Tamil Nadu.

Mangalorean.com)

A ransacked ward of K R Hospital, Mysore. (Source: Mangalorean.com)

Two aspects here: one, the rumour that children had died. The worst part of this was that a local television channel is said to have reported the death, without actually verifying the exact cause. The word, quoting the TV flash, spread adding more inaccuracies to the original falsehood.

The second aspect, is one which didn’t get highlighted in the mass media, obviously for reasons of sensitivity. It is that most of the parents belonged to the Muslim community. One English paper reported that in places of worship people were advised to consult doctors. 

Let me emphasise here that going by the crowd at the hospitals, of course, many non-Muslims too were evidently worried about the polio drops that were given to children. For example, our maid, who is a Christian, was woken up by neighbours around 11 pm and told to take her child to hospital. She told us that the neighbours had said that the police were announcing that many children had died. I am dead sure that the police would never ever make such an announcement. 

The rumour angle is a socio-psychological phenomenon. We all fall for them depending upon how much confidence we have in ourselves and in the system we live in. Actually, in this age of “SMS and e-mail forwarding”, a lot of info that’s floating around are inaccurate. Jokes and humour are exceptions, but not others that contain facts. We also just keep forwarding stuff without ensuring the accuracy of what is contained in them.

The Kano link

The second aspect to the Bangalore incident, the Muslim angle, is nothing new actually; only that it’s unprecedented in Bangalore. Here is a little background to this:

The global polio eradication programme began in 1988 mainly under the initiative of the World Health Organisation. It was undergoing a good run, with any nations being formally declared polio-free. In India it was launched in 1994 under the Pulse Polio banner.

The global effort hit a major obstacle in 2002, when in Kano province of north Nigeria (largely Muslim populated unlike the south which is Christian dominated), religious leaders (including a well-known doctor) claimed that many samples of the vaccine supplied by the west were adulterated to reduce fertility and caused AIDS. This they said was part of the US-led drive against Islam in the post-9/11 scenario.

A few other reasons added to the fears. In 1996, Pfizer company conducted a trial on children to test a drug against bacterial meningitis. The company was later taken to court under the charge that it resulted in the death of 11 children. The American war on Iraq (seen by many Muslims as unnecessary and unprovoked) only fuelled the conspiracy theory on the polio vaccine.  

In 1999, a controversial book “The River” hit the stands. In it the author, Edward Hooper, says the modern HIV came from an experimental polio vaccine which was being used in Belgian Congo in the 1950s. This vaccine was being tried on a medium of chimpanzee cells that had been infected with monkey virus, which is considered the precursor of AIDS.

Most AIDS experts deny this theory about the origin of AIDS. Also Hooper says he never ever suggested that the modern polio vaccine contains any AIDS virus. But many Nigerian religious leaders and journalists were unconvinced.

Around that time, there were reports in Nigeria that university scientists had found estrogen in the polio vaccine. Estrogen is one of the ingredients in birth control pills. Any birth control measures in Nigeria is very controversial. The whole thing got politically and emotionally coloured during the 2003 Nigerian elections.

The conspiracy theory reached India in 2004. Uttar Pradesh was the victim. Health officials were banned from entering localities, and there were bizarre reports of children being hidden from these officials.

Though within a year, Nigeria reported resumption of the eradication drive, many doubt if it’s working as effectively as it should. Within a couple of years of the Nigerian ban, 18 countries that were once polio-free reported outbreaks, which some scientists say can be traced to Nigeria. And, most worryingly among these countries is India.

A total of 535 cases have been reported in India in 2008, with the latest reported from Uttar Pradesh on November 27.

In India, the second part of the National Immunization Drive is on February 1.

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