LAGOS, Nigeria — When Lola Atiku brought her oldest son to the neighborhood clinic five years ago for routine immunizations, government health workers repeatedly turned her away, saying they had run out of needles or vaccine.
This week, as Atiku carried her youngest boy to the market, volunteers literally pulled her in off the street to administer the 15-month-old child's first measles shot and a polio booster. The boy, Basit, wailed from the sting, but his mother was impressed.
"They're making it a lot easier nowadays," said Atiku, 30, rocking the child.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is in the midst of an aggressive campaign to recover from a prolonged breakdown in its public health system that has triggered an alarming increase in deadly yet easily preventable diseases over the last two years.
As the rest of the world, including many African nations, made progress in eradicating polio and measles, Nigeria reported 837 polio cases through September, according to figures from the World Health Organization, or WHO. That's nearly 70% of the world's polio cases this year.
Measles, which was eradicated in developed nations decades ago, is still one of Nigeria's leading causes of death among children, claiming several hundred victims a year, according to the Health Ministry. (Exact figures are not known because of poor data collection.) Most worrisome, Nigeria's routine immunization coverage, including protection against childhood diseases such as polio, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus, is among the lowest in the world. Last year, routine immunization coverage was only 35%, according to the WHO.
In Africa, where most other nations report coverage rates of more than 80%, the only country that performed worse than Nigeria was Somalia, which has lacked a functioning central government for 15 years.
"We're trying to catch up," said Tola Kasali, the health commissioner of Lagos state, after kicking off the government's latest measles vaccination drive this week.
Officials blame myriad factors for Nigeria's lapse. Despite oil reserves that make this one of the continent's richest nations, government funding for public health has evaporated over the last decade.
State-run clinics ran out of vaccines or syringes. Workers went unpaid. Sometimes vaccines were available at regional centers but could not be distributed to local clinics because government vehicles had no gasoline, said Chris Kamugisha, the WHO medical officer in charge of immunizations in Abuja, the capital.
