EDITORIAL: The first phase of this year’s polio eradication campaign was kicked off by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday by administering vaccination drops to children.
The three-day drive is to cover 44 million children while in 16 districts of Sindh, where the administration was busy conducting local government elections, it is to be launched later this month.
As many as 359,614 polio workers are taking part in this campaign as the national and provincial emergency operations centres remain on hand in the high risk and vulnerable areas to facilitate implementation work.
For several years Pakistan has regularly been running these campaigns to protect children from this preventable debilitating disease. Yet when the finishing line seems to be in sight the effort is hampered by religious extremists who think it is a Western ploy to sterilize children to stop Muslim populations from increasing.
They have been attacking vaccinators and their security escorts. Over 100 health workers and policemen guarding them have been killed in the tribal areas as well as in different other parts of the country. Thanks to these frontline health workers and 350, 614 participating in the latest drive, the Polio Eradication Programme is back on track, but progress remains elusive.
In a statement issued in conjunction with the latest vaccination campaign, Federal Health Minister Abdul Qadir Patel said that 20 cases of police were reported during the “current” (actually past) year, adding that ‘fortunately’ the virus was restricted to tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
It could be seen as ‘fortunate’ in that the measures the government had put in place to ensure all children entering or leaving the extremists infested tribal areas take polio drops.
However, prevalence of the virus in those areas indicates the vaccinators, fearing for their lives, had knowingly left out some children.
In fact, according to media reports, in several instances health workers have been putting the mandatory ink mark on the fingers of children as proof of having done their job, without actually dispensing the polio drops.
The key challenge before the government, therefore, is to break resistance to vaccination so the health workers can perform their task without worrying about safety. Fresh thinking is in order to make the public better aware of the lifelong disabilities the polio virus causes among children.
The message can be put across more effectively if the periodic awareness campaigns feature real life examples of people crippled by polio because their parents refused to have them vaccinated.
Since the violent resisters employ a religious argument to undermine the push for vaccination, some prominent religious scholars have been coming out to support the polio eradication endeavor.
That has not helped much, though. Involvement of local clerics in the worst affected areas, perhaps, can make it easier to achieve the desired results.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023