When researching polio vaccine rumors on google, I found an LA Times article (http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/17/world/la-fg-pakistan-polio-20111017) about a more recent situation in pakistan in which muslim extremists and religious leaders denounce the polio vaccine as a western plot to sterilize their daughters and spread infection.

“Radical clerics seed rumors that vaccines are un-Islamic because they are made from substances derived from pigs, or that they cause infertility. Some clerics try to convince parents that polio vaccines are made from the urine of Satan.”

I would like to investigate the possible motives behind these statements. It seems highly counterproductive for religious leaders to subject their own people, possible even their very own children, to a lifetime of handicaps and suffering. Most articles I have read attribute these rumors to paranoia and weariness of any action rooted in the West, but such cultural distrust looks to me like an all too convenient mode of spreading propaganda.