ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- With its polio outbreak spreading, Nigeria is sending a team of scientists, officials and Muslim leaders abroad Sunday to bring back proof that the vaccine is neither contaminated nor a Western plot to spread AIDS.

Three predominantly Muslim northern states have suspended door-to-door vaccinations since October, citing fears that the vaccine could cause infertility or AIDS.

The United Nations says the outbreak has crossed into neighboring African countries, and is threatening a global campaign to wipe out the crippling virus.

The mission announced Friday will take the team to South Africa, Indonesia and India for a week to observe a battery of tests on the vaccine, Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo said.

"We want all the stakeholders to see for themselves and be convinced about whether or not the polio vaccines are safe," Lambo told The Associated Press.

Lambo will be on the team, along with representatives of state governments and religious organizations including Jama'atu Nasril Islam, among the nation's most influential Muslim groups.

Tests initiated by the federal government were performed in Nigeria and South Africa late last year and proved conclusively the vaccines were free of all harmful substances, officials say.

Muslim groups have rejected the results. Officials in the northern state of Kano insist their own scientists tested the vaccines and found trace amounts of estrogen and progesterone, female sex hormones which the officials feared could cause infertility.

Jama'atu Nasril Islam said it sponsored its own tests in Britain and India and got similar results.

Some Muslim religious leaders have preached that the vaccines cause infertility and spread AIDS, calling it a plot by the United States and its allies to depopulate Africa and other developing nations.

Among the team's members is Lawal Bichi, head of pharmacology at Bayero University in Kano, who oversaw his state's testing of the vaccine.

"I am going in with an open mind. All the parties are interested in the health of the children and the eradication of polio," Bichi told the AP.

Bruce Aylward, Geneva-based global coordinator of the U.N. World Health Organization's polio eradication campaign, stressed the vaccines had been repeatedly proven safe.

If any results showed hormones, these were "false positives" arising from improper testing methods or the mixing of foreign materials during the testing procedure, he told the AP.

Even hormones at the levels alleged by critics would be of "absolutely of no health consequence" and amount to less than the amount found naturally in breast milk, Aylward said.

West African nations will hold their next door-to-door polio campaign from Feb. 23-26 and again in March, hoping to immunize 65 million children in 10 West and Central African countries, Aylward said.

Seven -- Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Burkina Faso -- are nations where polio was once eliminated yet Nigerian strains of polio have recently crippled dozens of children.

When WHO and other organizations launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, 125 countries were affected by the disease. It has since been eradicated in Europe, the Americas, Australia and much of Asia and Africa.

Nigeria accounts for about 40 percent of the approximately 700 children crippled by the disease last year, Aylward said.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.