EDITORIAL: Despite regular immunisation campaigns polio remains a persistent challenge for Pakistan. So far this year, 17 cases of this debilitating disease afflicting children have been reported, three of them in Sindh, one in Punjab and almost all others in Balochistan.
Besides, as recently revealed by an official of the Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Instituted of Health in Islamabad, the type-1 Poliovirus (WPV1) was detected in environmental samples of 62 districts, signifying the risk of infection to children all across the country.
Although the virus has been found in environment samples of some districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), up to now there has been no confirmed case of the infection in that province. But as a press report points out, KP and Balochistan have had the highest number of polio cases during the last few years.
Part of the problem is that polio is endemic in Afghanistan, and the people in these two provinces frequently move across the Pak-Afghan border. In a positive development last August the Afghan government had decided to launch a vaccination drive concurrent with Pakistan’s five-day countrywide campaign that concluded this past Sunday.
Hopefully, coordination at least on this account will continue uninterrupted. Our own efforts keep getting forestalled by resistance from violent extremists who claim it to be a Western scheme to reduce the Muslim population by sterilizing children in the garb of polio vaccination.
They have killed many vaccinators and their police escorts. As the latest week-long campaign began an attack on an anti-polio team in KP’s tribal district Bajaur left a health worker and a policeman dead and another person injured. Also in Bajaur earlier this year a polio-eradication programme officer was killed.
Incidents such as these seem to explain the reports that the health workers put the mandatory ink mark on children’s thumbs without administering them the polio drops.
And to claim having done their job, they have been forging the immunisation data. In fact, a Peshawar health worker has been quoted as saying that each immunisation campaign ends with around 20,000 vaccination refusals in KP.
However, reports emanating from the tribal districts of KP suggest there is more to vaccination resistance than the threat of violence perpetrated by extremist elements.
In many areas people are said to have linked inoculation of their children with provision of water, electricity and construction of roads, while the tribesmen in Khyber district want the repatriation of people displaced during military operations.
All these are fair demands and need to be addressed. Involvement of local communities in immunisation drives is the best bet for driving the poliovirus out of this country.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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