Nigeria: A tale of unhealthy vaccine politics

THE confusion in the Nigerian case during the onset of Avian Influenza epidemic looks very much like a microcosm of the global response to COVID-19.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a panicky world resorted to a measure that stood a major public health principle on its head – the decision on mass vaccination, especially without testing in many nations, including Nigeria.

Way back in 2003, before avian influenza became a national problem, I had the privilege of being informed by Dr. Amubieya Owoade, a lecturer in the University of Ibadan (UI) that he detected some cases  of AI in some farms around Ibadan through seromonitoring.

Upon accepting the request for a guest speaker at the November 2003 Poultry Association of Nigeria Ogun State (PANOG) annual poultry summit in Kuto, Abeokuta, the same lecturer told the audience of participants that AI was in Nigeria already. People heard, shrugged their shoulders and went home, but did nothing to tame new infection making inroad to Nigeria.

Dr Owoade’s claims were corroborated by the nation’s then Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr. Fasanmi, who specifically gave me a letter from a Dutch Poultry Farm, written to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, notifying the ministry of a batch of hatchable eggs imported by a farm in Ibadan.

Dr. Fasanmi contacted the farm to ask if indeed they imported hatchable eggs, to which they initially responded in the affirmative. He then dispatched a team of officials to the farm to find out the status of the farm. Those people came to the farm after 21 days, by which time the eggs were already hatched and sold out. The farm, this time, denied importing hatchable eggs from the said farm in Holland, unmindful of the fact that the ministry had a written evidence.

By early 2004, a Nigerian Minister of Sports with the name Sambawa, owner of Sambawa Farms situated between Kaduna and Zaria, imported hatchable eggs from Egypt, also suspected to have had AI. His own farm couldn’t hide this as a professor of avian medicine from UI, Folorunso Adene, was able to make a tentative diagnosis of AI on that farm. An expensive journey had to be done by the National Veterinary Research Institute (NVRI), Vom, which had to take samples to Padova, Italy, for subsequent confirmation. While the poultry industry and the veterinary profession were fixated on Sambawa Farms, it was already a known fact that the Customs in Kano International Airport had been allowing hatchable eggs into Nigeria without inspection for a while.

So, all the talk about Avian Influenza coming into Nigeria in 2004 was just a narrative to give known perspectives to the epidemic, which was already ravaging the poultry industry for much earlier – in the south and in the north. It also fed into a wrong and dangerous assumption that AI came into Nigeria through Sambawa Farms in the north, leading the people to ignore the South West connection. What may be new may have been strains that could have been different. In other words, Nigeria was likely to have had no fewer than three or four different strains as at 2004.

It really didn’t make any scientific or economic sense to vaccinate at that point onward even though there was overwhelming clamour for it. The Human Pathogenic strains of AI (HPAI) was also already becoming an issue of worldwide concerns in the scientific community. But that didn’t receive any appreciable attention since the poultry strains were yet to be tracked and contained. In the poultry industry, some issues with public policy implications arose. One of them was what to do with the national stock of poultry.

Should all birds be destroyed and the federal government compensate all farmers? The difficulty involved in this decision could be captured this way:

At the time the Federal Government of Nigeria first came to the realisation that AI was already a national problem, many vested interests were already springing up, waiting to capture the windfall from the FG. The (human) medical people claimed it was within their purview, even when no clear-cut distinction was yet made between poultry influenza and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. The information ministry of the FG decided their role was paramount and would like to be the driver of key activities, particularly the narratives. The Agriculture officials weren’t as prepared or as well-equipped policy-wise to take the lead. And nature detests vacuum. The academic community had some subtle in-fighting and the usual seniority factor in public universities took hold as a bovine medicine professor had to lead the fight against avian disease from the academic community, an aberration of some sorts.

The poultry industry practitioners were not well armed with tenable industry statistics for making strong cases for compensation. There were exaggerated claims and inflation of figures of commercial birds on which many farmers wanted compensation. That alone put the government in an awkward position. It was clear that a lot of false claims were going to be made and settlement would be done on fictitious farms and birds.

This is where the Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN) would (or should) have been most useful as a central body to interface with the government. But PAN wasn’t prepared, nor is it still prepared today should any other crisis befall the poultry industry. The whole idea of vaccination should have been easier to do if the farms and their birds population were easily delineated through seromonitoring. The presence of HPAI would also have been easier to detect had the veterinary and human medics cooperated and worked together closely with the mission to accomplish a well articulated common goal of poultry disease management and public health. It was therefore not advisable going on to just vaccinate when birds’ serology has not been carried out. Vaccinating already infected birds was clearly a recipe for disaster, just as leaving out uninfected birds without vaccination. Not paying attention to highly pathogenic avian influenza was also an unwarranted risk for the human population.

Despite not being the best option, vaccination during a pandemic has been given a global push, fueling misgivings and suspicions about possible conspiracy theory, politics and pecuniary benefits to vaccine manufacturers, especially as there are limited discussions about therapeutic alternatives to vaccines.

Overall, it would have amounted to some forms of guesswork or magic to just hope to vaccinate blindly and thereafter get all birds covered and safe. It would also have amounted to throwing money around aimlessly. Government’s indecision and subsequent half-hearted intervention made the poultry industry vulnerable as many farm enterprises would have gone down under if mass destruction of birds were done without commensurate compensation. The insurance cover was absent for a vast majority of the farms to put them back in business in case of epidemics. It was therefore not safe to assume that highly pathogenic avian influenza was absent in the human population.

It could be discerned from the foregoing that a combination of corruption, confusion, collusion, complacency and capacity deficiency were responsible for the regrettable state of Nigerian poultry since the avian influenza crisis broke out in Nigeria and the industry practitioners have been muddling through since then, with everyone doing what best suits him. This is a sad reminder of an industry in disarray, requiring urgent and lasting coordination. The search for scientific details on highly pathogenic avian influenza, however, would require casting a wide net. Disease modelling on this subject should include the perspectives shared here if the true picture of AI in general and highly pathogenic avian influenza in particular is to be obtained from practical and realistic perspectives.

Dr. Olukayode Oyeleye, a public Health Veterinarian is former Senior Special Adviser to Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development) wrote the piece originally for:

http://africasti.com.ng/the-dilemma-of-hpai-and-covid-19-in-nigeria/