Nigerian state upholds ban on polio vaccinations.

2004 FEB 11 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Officials of a heavily Islamic northern Nigerian state said they wouldn't lift a ban on polio immunizations, after local tests failed to assuage fundamentalists' fears that the doses contain ingredients to render Muslims infertile.

Since extremists shut down a U.N.-backed campaign to eradicate the disease in Kano and two other states in October, Nigerian federal authorities have tested random samples of the vaccine, declaring them free of sterility-inducing hormones.

But authorities in Kano, a hard-hit region in one of the few remaining nations where polio stills cripples children, said their own tests showed questionable substances in some vaccine samples.

"We conducted our own tests, which found certain agents which were not supposed to be in the vaccine," Kano state spokesman Sule Yau Sule told the Associated Press.

"We are concerned that polio still exists and as a government we will do everything possible to help eradicate it - but our fears have to be allayed," he said.

No immunizations would take place in Kano state until "concerns have been adequately addressed," he said.

Alhassan Bichi - a pharmacist who led the local investigation ordered by Kano governor Ibrahim Shekerau - told the AP his investigation had found that some vaccines contained estrogen, which he said was capable of suppressing fertility in women.