Doug
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02:41:42 am on March 12, 2004 | # |
sunspot.net - print edition: If it were possible to wind back the centuries, Halima Umar’s village would probably look much as it does today. Umar and her neighbors fetch water by lowering a bucket into a hand-dug well, toil in fields of millet and guinea corn, and sleep in houses made of mud, leaves and animal hair, the walls sagging like sandcastles struck by an ocean wave.
In January last year, Nigerian health workers knocked on Umar’s door, offering her newborn daughter a free dose of polio vaccine.
But Umar turned the vaccinators away. Most of her neighbors did the same, some hiding children under their beds.
They had heard a rumor circulating through the hot, dusty villages of northern Nigeria that the vaccine had been contaminated with an anti-fertility agent that would sterilize their children or perhaps infect them with the AIDS virus, all part of an American plot to depopulate the developing world. The villagers believed it.
Evolution in action. Apparently, it’s never occurred to these deliberately ignorant, religiously deluded fools that if we really wanted to depopulate their country, the best course we could take would be to encourage them in their idiocies.
