Since we thrive on conspiracy theories, there are quite a few of them doing the rounds on polio too.

Take, polio vaccine is un-Islamic and a conspiracy of America and the western world to contain the birth rate of the Muslims.

Some religious groups have used the above as a propaganda tool for the last three decades or so. This has led to low or no vaccination of children in many parts of the country.

Along the same vein, when iodised salt was introduced in Pakistan a couple of decades ago, it was termed a conspiracy.

All such international initiatives face resistance in Pakistan. When Dr Syed Muhammad Khalil Wasti, professor of pediatrics in King Edward Medical College, Lahore detected the first polio case in the subcontinent in 1948, nobody believed him.

Later, Dr Wasti told his students that the Crime Investigation Department of police, kept an eye on him for a whole year -- because his findings were termed ‘anti-state’ and part of a ‘western conspiracy’.

Polio vaccination campaign also met huge resistance in 1978 with the beginning of Expanded Program on Immunisation (EPI) in Pakistan. This nationwide campaign was considered a western conspiracy by religious circles and clerics, meant to cause infertility. The campaign was also termed as ‘anti-Islam’, mostly in the rural Pakistan.

Since then, the resistance has persisted in many parts of the country.

"This is because of the international movements for the revival of medieval Islamic caliphate so that Muslims are made to hate the modern world in a way that suits the movement," observes Mobarak Haider, political activist, writer, and thinker. He says that the consumer commodities, such as mobile phones, are acceptable for such elements as they draw benefit from them -- that they do not find a conspiracy in them.

He says all anti-disease campaigns, which are sponsored and managed by international institutions without the participation of the local business community, are treated similarly. "Because of lack of education, they use these things to strengthen their political movement and add to the hatred of the common Muslim against the ‘enemies of their political Islam’."

A variant of this conspiracy theory has led to deadly consequences in other Muslim countries as well. Nigeria was on top of the list of countries where this theory of sterilisation took hold of Muslim population in 2003. A physician and the president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Sharia Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, accused Americans of lacing the vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilised children. The propaganda caused the polio to return to epidemic proportions in that area.

Later, with global efforts, World Health Organization made arrangements to manufacture this vaccine in a Muslim country Indonesia. This satisfied Nigerian Muslims. This kind of resistance was seen in India in 2004 where some communities feared it was meant to control their birth rate.

The resistance to polio drops took a major turn in Pakistan in 2007-08, when Maulana Fazlullah, the current chief of banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), announced a ban on polio vaccination in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The sitting TTP chief, known as Mullah Radio, gave speeches on radio, urging people to say no to polio vaccine drops on religious grounds. He used to deliver sermons from his mosque urging people to stay away from the visiting vaccination teams.

"Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players -- the United States, India and Israel -- change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken centre stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here," The New York Times says in a report in 2010.

"The purpose is clearly to build a psyche that is anti-science and medieval," says Haider, adding, "They [cleric] play with human issues, like polio vaccination, because these are sensitive and can be used to their advantage. The solution lies in awakening the minds of the common people by the state, which is weak."