Learning from Nigeria on battling the anti-vaxxers

Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were three countries where anti-vaccination campaigns led by Muslin clerics and fanatics seriously set back the very real chance to globally eradicate polio. But Shobana Shankar writes that a vigorous campaign waged by Nigeria to combat the anti-vaxxwers provides useful lessons to the US as it finds itself having to deal with its own anti-vaxxers.

To consider that Nigeria, infamous for anti-vaxx campaigns leading to polio outbreaks, has any lessons for Americans may be shocking.

But as measles cases in the U.S. climb to an all-time high after the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, U.S. public health officials have been looking for ways to address the problem.

As a researcher on religious politics and health, I believe that Nigeria’s highly mobilized efforts to eliminate polio can teach America how to reverse the increase in measles cases and shore up its public health infrastructure. Working with international partners, Nigerians have combated misinformation, suspicion of vaccine science and religion-based boycotts to go from ground zero for polio on the African continent in 2003 to nearly polio-free in 2019.
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Nigerians understood that simply ostracizing religious communities would not work. Anti-vaxx politics tapped into mistrust of government and “others” that ran deep in a diverse but divided society, where religious, regional and ethnic loyalties took priority over national unity.
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The polio infrastructure in Nigeria immerses experts and local communities in an ongoing relationship. It is an elaborate multilayered surveillance system, with many strategies and functions, from mundane visits to weekly record reviews at health centers in polio-affected areas.
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Nigeria spent over US$8 million on surveillance alone and expanded polio capabilities to fight other diseases like measles and rubella. While the system puts a heavy workload on health officials, it points the way for how the American public health system can reshape existing structures for the current era. America led international health partnerships for decades, but the time has come to follow other countries’ lead.

The big problem is persuading Americans that we can learn from other countries. After all, aren’t we the greatest?

A comment thread that is well worth reading

I am not sure how many people read the comments to my posts. If you don’t, you are missing a treat because those are often better than my original posts.

For example, I recently had a post about whether plants are conscious. It was a pretty superficial post looking at recent claims and counterclaims. But the comments from this blog’s readers went really deeply into the nature of consciousness and how we might identify its existence. It contains a lot of useful information and insights and that comment thread is definitely worth a read.

Don’t believe your lying eyes

In an earlier post I showed what I thought was an impressive video only to be informed by commenters that it was a CGI fake. So once again I had been fooled by a fake video into thinking it was the real thing. The techniques have become so sophisticated that people can now create ‘deep fakes’, where images of one person are superimposed onto videos of someone else. These are done so seamlessly that it is almost impossible for ordinary people casually watching a video to detect that the person they are seeing did not actually say or do the things that we see with our own eyes.

Apparently the software to do this does not require all that much sophistication to use and thus the potential for malicious actors to exploit it is huge. The video below explains what is going on and how some people are trying to find ways to more quickly identify deep fakes, initially focusing on all the candidates for the next presidential election whom mischief makers are most likely to target. (I think this video is real but what do I know?)
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The science of stone skipping

Which one of us, finding ourselves near a large body of calm water, has been able to resist the temptaion to indulge in the delightful activity of trying to skip stones across the surface? The number of skips that I am able to get before it sinks is three, maybe four. So it is a pleasure to see world champion Keisuke Hashimoto in acction. His wind up alone is thing of beauty. (Via Rusty Blazenhoff)

(To see the above, follow the link that the ‘video unavailable’ window provides.)

But he is still mortal and doesn’t always succeed.
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Are plants conscious?

My late cousin was a serious grower of roses with his flowers winning awards at local shows. On a visit to his garden once, I noticed that he had placed a radio in the middle of all the rose bushes and he told me that he had heard that plants thrive on music. I too had heard this but dismissed it as the whimsy of plant lovers. I even teased him by asking him which roses bushes were not performing up to his expectations and when he pointed them out to me, I gave them a stern talking to.
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TV review: Black Mirror: Season 5 (no spoilers)

Netflix recently released the three episodes of season 5 of the acclaimed series Black Mirror. As people who have seen earlier seasons know, this show takes a somewhat dark look at the impact of technology on our lives. It is usually set a little in the future and imagines advances on current technology that on the surface seem benign and even a boon to people but turn out to have unexpected negative consequences. In particular it focuses on the kind of technology that is ubiquitous, such as social media and AI.
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The reclamation of the Cuyahoga river

The Cuyahoga is a long and winding river that empties into Lake Erie after splitting the city of Cleveland into east and west sides. For the longest time, it was treated as a dump and industries along the river emptied their waste matter, even toxic material, into it. As a result, the river used to catch fire periodically. But the fire that erupted 50 years ago yesterday, though not the biggest, for some reason attracted national attention and turned the city into a laughing stock with comedians using it as a punch line. To this day, that is the first association that many people have with the city.
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Maybe it’s an alien-planted monolith!

A survey of the gravitational field on the surface of the moon to determine its makeup underneath has discovered the existence of a mass underneath one of the craters.

Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters, the Baylor scientists have two theories for the origin of the huge subterranean blob. It could be the leftovers of dense oxides created in the last years when the moon’s surface was an ocean of magma — a theory that relies on the giant-impact hypothesis, when an impactor the size of Mars may have collided into a magma-covered Earth, ejecting magma into orbit that became the surface of the moon. But speaking with National Geographic, the Baylor team appears to prefer the idea that the mass is the remainder of the iron-nickel core of an ancient impactor that created the South Pole-Aitken basin.

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It’s about time: New York state bans religious exemptions for vaccinations

In the wake of a resurgence of diseases once thought eliminated, the state of New York has passed legislation that bans religious exemptions for vaccinations, joining California, Mississippi, West Virginia and Maine in eliminating that loophole. Naturally those who have fallen for the anti-vaccination misinformation put out by some people and used the religious exemption to avoid getting their children vaccination are not happy.
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