Photo credit: Hallah Tashikalmah
Published October 8, 2013, last updated on April 9, 2018
Former Nigerian Health Minister and DGHI Visiting Scholar Muhammad Ali Pate has been trying to do what no one has been able to accomplish before him—finally drive the poliovirus from Nigeria, one of the last and most stubborn reservoirs in the world. The stakes are high: The outcome of the 25-year-and-counting effort to wipe the virus off the face of the earth rests in large part on the effort that Pate and his handpicked team have put together in northern Nigeria.
You can't do it by fiat, Pate explains during a 3-day car trip in mid-April through the north, where the virus is entrenched. Top down doesn't work in a country as complicated as Nigeria, an amalgam of colliding cultures and ethnic groups, with a discredited and powerless federal government and relentless insurgency and violence.
Instead, Pate, who hails from a Muslim village in the north, works from the ground up, persuading one boy in the streets of Kaduna North, or the next day paying courtesy calls to emirs at their palaces, or shaming local government officials who are misusing funds, or vaccinating kids in a nomadic community near the side of the road.
Read more in Science's "The Art of Eradicating Polio."
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