Polio eradication

EDITORIAL: It is one thing to express concern and announce yet more corrective measures, like the government has done after polio cases in the country suddenly spiked, we have had 42 confirmed cases and counting, appear poised to touch half century this year, but someone should and will have to explain this shocking jump from just one case as recently as 2021 to this high number in 2024.

We’ve been hearing for years how conservative religious influences, particularly in border areas with Afghanistan, have been influencing local populations against vaccinating their children, which is why the virus is growing. Indeed, this tendency is behind the many, many attacks on polio workers not just in those areas but in other parts of the country as well.

But why has that been the end of the matter? The proof of the pudding lies in the eating, after all, so clearly whatever strategies successive governments have employed in the last decade or so have not worked. Even now there are murmurs about the Sindh government mobilising clerics to back yet another spirited initiative to vaccinate millions upon millions of children, just like we’ve heard so many times in the past. Yet if such reactionary policies have not worked in the past, wouldn’t relying on them to do the job this time amount to reinforcing failure?

It’s not that the government has never properly tried to get control of the situation. It is, rather, that its efforts have not been properly targeted and it’s never been able to convince people, especially near the porous Afghan border, that they were being misled as part of a greater war on the state. And, slowly but surely, this tendency of confusing polio vaccination with religious injunctions spilled over from KP and Balochistan into other provinces with the state watching from the side.

It’s a shame that the country’s children have been badly let down by the state. Children – over 40 percent by World Bank’s estimates – are stunted. Many more are malnourished and start their lives with a distinct disadvantage that compromises their physical and mental wellbeing forever.

The government must immediately reset its priorities, declare a national emergency, erect a comprehensive national narrative, and take the fight to whoever is preventing Pakistani families from vaccinating their children against the poliovirus.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024