Remember our old friend, the polio virus?

It’s coming back in a big way, thanks to a pre-rational conspiracy delusion that has taken hold of the Muslim population of northern Nigeria, with help from local imams and Islamic “scholars:” Conspiracy theory keeps polio alive. (Hat tip: noshariaincanada.)

A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate polio was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has singlehandedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.

The theory’s source seems to be one Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68, a physician and president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Shari’a Law. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Americans of lacing the polio vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilizes children (or, in an alternate theory, infects them with AIDS) and considers them, according to John Murphy of The Baltimore Sun, “the worst criminals on Earth… Even Hitler was not as evil as that.”

This fear of polio vaccines caught on, explains a doctor with the World Health Organization, because of the war in Iraq. “If America is fighting people in the Middle East,” goes the Islamist logic, “the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims.”

Local imams repeated and spread the sterilization theory, which won wide acceptance despite vocal assurances to the contrary from the WHO, the Nigerian government and many Nigerian doctors and scientists.

Ibrahim Shekarau, governor of Kano, one of the three Nigerian states that refused the polio vaccine, justified the decision not to vaccinate on the grounds that “it is a lesser of two evils to sacrifice two, three, four, five, even 10 children [to polio] than allow hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of girl-children likely to be rendered infertile.”

The Baltimore Sun offers the example of a young Nigerian mother who rejected polio vaccine for her child. The child did get polio, and the mother was asked if she regretted her decision. Unhesitatingly, she replied, “No, I would do the same [again].” Villagers saw the vaccination program as a threat and on occasion “chased, threatened and assaulted vaccinators. Frustrated, some vaccination teams dumped thousands of doses of the vaccine rather than face angry villagers.”

UPDATE at 5/25/05 6:45:23 pm:

At MSNBC, from earlier this month: African polio strain spreads to Indonesia.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - A strain of polio that’s hit parts of Africa and the Middle East appears almost identical to one that has reached Indonesia, raising the prospect that a migrant worker may have brought it back to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

An 18-month-old girl in the West Java village of Girijaya was diagnosed with polio on April 21, becoming the first Indonesian to contract the disease since 1995. Authorities say the strain is genetically similar to one in Nigeria, where the disease spread rapidly after Muslims boycotted the vaccine in 2003, fearing a U.S.-led plot to render them infertile or infect them with AIDS.