To mark UN Anti-Corruption Day in December, Transparency International released the results of its 2004 Global Corruption Barometer highlighting ongoing corruption, especially in the developing world. The survey found that worldwide, 1 in 10 people said they or a member of their household had paid a bribe in the previous year.
The survey polled more […]
Governor Ibrahim Shekarau of Nigeria’s Kano state this month removed an 11-month ban on polio vaccination in that state. Polio vaccinations were halted in August 2003 after absurd claims that the polio vaccine was part of a plot to make Nigerian girls infertile.
The ban on vaccinations saw a marked increase in polio cases in Nigeria […]
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that the World Health Organization is investigating a possible outbreak of polio in the northern Nigerian state of Kano.
Kano officials suspended polio vaccination efforts in 2003 over concerns that the vaccine was a plot against Nigerian Muslims.
Now, 20-30 suspected cases of polio have been reported […]
At the same time that some countries are complaining that the polio vaccine is dangerous, the World Health Organization announced in January that new cases of polio had been discovered in two African countries where WHO had previously labeled the disease as eradicated.
Polio cases were discovered in both Benin and Cameroon in early January, apparently […]
The World Health Organization’s goal of eradicating polio worldwide by 2005 ran into a major obstacle in October 2003 when three Nigerian states suspended polio vaccination over fears that the vaccine could cause AIDS, cancer and infertility.
The largely-Muslim northern states of Kaduna, Kano and Zamfra ordered a stop to a WHO-sponsored vaccination program. Reuters quoted […]
A couple years ago I wrote about Nigeria’s chronic gasoline shortages — ironic for a country that is one of the world’s leading exporters of oil.
This year the Nigerian government began to address the fuel shortages by moving slowly to eliminating one of the factors responsible for it — subsidies on gasoline that make it […]
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that cases of polio worldwide increased four-fold in 2002 due largely to an outbreak of the disease in India.
In 2001 there were only 483 confirmed cases of polio which shot up to 1,920 confirmed cases in polio after an outbreak in the Indian states […]