Disease victim urges Somali children to gulp down vaccine

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Ali Maow Maalim knew smallpox was lurking in Somalia, but when his fellow hospital workers were getting vaccinated a quarter-century ago, he couldn't bear the thought of a needle jabbing his arm. So he rolled up his left shirt sleeve and pretended he had already gotten a shot.

"I made myself miss the vaccine thinking I was cheating the others. But later it turned out I was cheating myself," Maalim, now 46 and the last known victim of smallpox in nature, said in an interview Tuesday.

Still bearing the scars of the disease that ravaged the world before it was declared eradicated in 1979, Maalim now works with the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children's Fund to encourage Somalis to ensure their children gulp down the vaccine that will wipe out polio from its final redoubts in Africa.

Maalim came down with "furuq" -- as the Somalis call smallpox -- in October 1977 when he was working at the government hospital in Merca, 60 miles south of Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean.

Maalim caught the disease when he and his colleagues were sent to rural areas to vaccinate nomadic camel herders, subsistence farmers and workers building an irrigation system on the Juba River.

"Unfortunately, one day a boy and a girl suffering from the disease were brought to the hospital, and I had to take them to a quarantine facility outside town," Maalim said.

About a month later, the 21-year-old came down with a high fever and began vomiting. Rather than go to the hospital and admit he had not been vaccinated against smallpox, Maalim said he went to a traditional healer who rubbed her spit on his body. It didn't help.

He learned the girl he had taken into quarantine had died; then, he was taken to the same quarantine facility.

"I couldn't lie on my back or my stomach because the pustules grew worse and worse," recalled Maalim, who still has scars on his legs and neck. "But with the help of Allah, after 55 days, I recovered."

Now married with two wives and five children age 2 to 20, Maalim says that being the last person known to have acquired smallpox in nature, "does not make me any happier, nor does it make me gloomy."

A final smallpox case in 1978 occurred as a result of a laboratory accident in England.

But, Maalim says, his infection has motivated him to encourage people to trust vaccines against polio and tuberculosis.

"Because I had the sad experience of defying the vaccine and then suffered as a result, now I work as a polio vaccine agent with WHO and UNICEF," he said.