Rumors spark polio vaccine panic in south India

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Rumors spark polio vaccine panic in south India

http://is.gd/cZR5 (Reuters Health)

BANGALORE, India

(Reuters) - Thousands of parents and their children protested outside hospitals

in the southern Indian city of Bangalore

following false rumors that children had fallen sick after being given polio

drops, police said on Monday.

Police said nobody had fallen ill from the vaccine and filed

a complaint against a local TV station, saying it helped spread panic following

the rumors of children contracting fever and vomiting.

Police used megaphones to cool tempers at a government

hospital on Sunday night where more than 3,000 people had gathered, as traffic

slowed to a crawl in parts of the infotech city.

Protesters pushed some doctors and smashed hospital windows,

after their children were administered polio drops as part of a government

immunization drive launched more than a decade ago.

"They were all worried and aggressive," Bangalore's assistant

commissioner of police, Ashok Kumar, told Reuters. "It was a difficult

situation. They left only after doctors and police officials assured them of

their children's safety."

A world effort to beat polio has succeeded in slashing the

number of cases by 99 percent over the past two decades, but the disease is

still endemic in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan

and Nigeria.

Suspicions about polio vaccines worsened after a major

outbreak in India

in 2006, when some Muslims resisted polio drops for their children following

rumors that it was part of a Western ploy to sterilize their offspring.

Polio, which is incurable, leads to irreversible paralysis.

India has had 535 polio cases in 2008 so

far compared to 471 in the same period last year, according to data from the

World Health Organization (WHO).