Some influential Muslim leaders in Kano openly oppose polio vaccination, saying it is a conspiracy against Muslim children.
The next polio vaccination campaign will be held 19-21 September, targeting 16.5 million children in the districts at the highest risk.
Two polio vaccination workers have been killed in a landmine blast in the Kurram tribal region of north-west Pakistan, officials say.
Two days after that attack, two polio vaccination workers were killed in a landmine blast in the Kurram tribal region of the country.
Mindful of the risks they faced, they were courageously doing their part to support a national polio vaccination drive to eradicate this crippling disease.
On Thursday, a controversial Islamic cleric spoke out against the polio vaccination campaign, telling people that new cases of polio were caused by contaminated medicine.
In October 2003, the government of Kano State in Nigeria stopped an ongoing polio vaccination program and did not allow it to resume until August 2004.
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The idea that it was a CIA plot, for instance, or the idea that an American-led polio vaccination campaign unintentionally gave a million Africans a chimp virus in the late 1950s.
Incidents have included the killings of three North Korean doctors in northern Yobe and the killings of nine people working for a government polio vaccination program in the northern city of Kano this month.
For example, after his identity was disclosed, the local doctor who assisted in the manhunt for bin Laden under the cover of a polio vaccination program in Abbottabad was convicted of treason and sentenced to thirty-three years in a Pakistani prison.
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Attitudes toward the polio vaccination differ sharply between the Pakistani Taliban, a movement with little chance of taking over the state, and the Afghan Taliban, who ruled their country in the past and see themselves as a government-in-waiting, ready to return to Kabul once the U.S.-led coalition departs next year.
For years, the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, has been issuing safe-conduct letters to WHO-sponsored polio-vaccination teams operating in insurgent areas.
In addition, as the BBC's interview with the son of the man who invented the Polio vaccine showed, the particular vaccination being administered seems to have problems (it seems to have the opposite effect than intended).
Without widespread vaccination in those countries, polio could re-establish itself in any of them.
By the 1960s, widespread vaccination campaigns had virtually eliminated polio from Europe and the U.S. Polio lingered in the U.S., mainly in the Amish population who refused to accept vaccinations, but it finally disappeared in 1979.
An anti-polio campaign this year achieved a 112% vaccination rate, says the health minister.
Pre-vaccination, there were 350, 000 polio cases worldwide in 1988.
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The police officer was shot dead as he guarded a vaccination team which was inside a house giving polio drops.
Only last week an emergency vaccination programme was ordered in Cairo after samples of the polio virus were found in sewage - the strain matches that in southern Pakistan.
And those systems can be used to help expand routine vaccination and other health activities, which means the legacy of polio eradication will live beyond the disease itself.
The polio vaccine controversy shows the inability of the Nigerian government and the WHO in conveying appropriate vaccination messages to the Nigerian public.
Because vaccination programs have been so successful, very few people know someone who had polio, and a lot of parents of young children never even had chickenpox, he says.
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