African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic THE ... - Blackherbals.com

Continued from page 41 – Vaccine-Induced Polio
throw the government. Fortunately the intelligence
officer who came to interrogate me proved to be very
intelligent. When I told him that really the polio
(vaccine) they were using in Uganda was discontinued
in America because it was the sole cause of polio. And
according to the information I had, there was really no
polio in Uganda.
There had been no polio. I grew up to be twenty five. I
didn't see anybody with polio. I started seeing polio
when I went to the cities where polio vaccination had
taken place. And the more they challenged me, the
more I started digging about polio, you know, to
educate myself and stand ready to go to court or to be
charged. And then what the intelligence officer
recommended to government was (that they) bring
health officials to debate me at the radio station so that
if I was telling lies, then they should come and expose
me before my very audience.
To this the Minister of Health, who was backed by
UNICEF, the United States Agency for International
Development and the World Health Organization, said
that really it shouldn't be like this. I shouldn't debate
polio because I'm not a scientist. Now I have been a
broadcaster for more than fourteen years, and all I was
saying was not that people should not go for
vaccination, but that if they are to go for vaccination, if
there is a vaccine that is deemed to be safe, then that's
what they should use. And then by a stroke of good
luck somebody brought me an insert that comes with
the polio vaccine, and it was from Pasteur-Mer???? a
French company that manufactures the polio vaccine,
and that was the one that was used in 1997 when
children started dying in large numbers. And when I
looked at the contra-indications it stated that inactivated
polio vaccine and not oral polio vaccine should be used
in situations where families had HIV - where there was
a history of HIV in the family. And when I got this
information I was really shocked because since 1984
Uganda has had a very difficult HIV and AIDS
problem. In fact it says that if a child is inadvertently
given the oral polio vaccine, that that child should be
quarantined for four to seven weeks because oral polio
vaccine is "live" and they keep shedding it between that
period, and they could contaminate other people. So I
was saying here is the manufacturer who is writing for
anybody who could read English that please do not give
this oral polio vaccine to population that have HIV and
here is the Ministry of Health which, in its own
wisdom, says this has to be used here.
So, armed with this insert from the manufacturer, I
decided to install wireless internet in the radio station
and also to see what other people were saying. At that
time one of the main advisors to the government of
Uganda was the Centers for Disease Control - one of the
most respected agencies in the world. So I tried to see
what the Centers for Disease Control was saying about
this oral polio vaccine, which should not be used
according to the manufacturer, and the Centers for
Disease Control was even more clear than the
manufacturer. In fact, this is what it says. It says that
persons who have congenitally acquired immune
deficiency disease -e.g. combined immune deficiency,
blah, blah - should not be given oral polio vaccine
because of their substantially increased risk for vaccine
associated disease. Now, they continue: they say
"inactivated polio vaccine and not oral polio vaccine
should be used to vaccinate immunodeficient persons and
their household contacts." So I said if this is the Centers
for Disease Control which is advising the government of
Uganda, and it is saying we should not use oral polio
vaccine, and here is the manufacturer saying oral polio
vaccine should not be used, now why should oral polio
vaccine be used here ?
And then at the time, because of the heightened tension
that the Minister of Health was bringing to bear on the
radio station, then other people started throwing their
own questions. And they went like this: In Africa polio
does not kill anybody and they say it's very rare to catch.
It's really very rare to get paralytic polio. They say it's in
very rare circumstances, so what is it that is killing
people in Africa? Malaria. Every five seconds a child is
dying of malaria in Africa. Now to get the dose of lifesaving
anti-malaria is about $5 but there is no
government to give anti-malaria. When somebody gets
malaria, if they have no money they even die. So the
question I was asking and many people were asking was
'If you really want to help children, why begin with a
disease that they don't have? (applause) Why not look for
something that is killing them and save them from what is
killing them?' And then (inaudible) .............'you know
what, I like you very much. I save your children from this
killer disease. Now there are no other diseases apart from
this rare polio, so let's go and fight that as well.' But you
don't begin with the rarest disease and spend all the
government's meagre resources fighting polio, which is
not a threat to most people, and then ignore something
that is killing them in large numbers like malaria, like
AIDS, like cholera, issues to do with sanitation, stunted
growth - all the main things that matter to people the
government was not fighting. So what they decided to do
was to appeal to the president and say... and the president
says to them 'What you could do is go and take him to
court and if the court decides that he's giving false
information, then charge him with sedition which carries
Continued on page 43
-42- Traditional African Clinic April 2009