‘More efforts needed to end polio’
NEXT SIX MONTHS WILL BE CRITICAL, SAYS POLIO OVERSIGHT BOARD AS IMMUNISATION DRIVE ENDS
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan kicked off the third nationwide polio vaccination campaign last week, hoping to reach over 33 million children under the age of five across the country’s 124 districts. But it appears that the efforts are not enough.
The Polio Oversight Board (POB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has urged Imran’s government to “do more” to end the scourge of polio that continues to linger in the country.
What is GPEI?
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a public-private partnership led by national governments with six partners — the World Health Organisation (WHO), Rotary International, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the vaccine alliance. Its goal is to eradicate polio worldwide.
Visiting members of the Polio Oversight Board met government representatives in Islamabad to offer direction to Pakistan’s polio eradication programme.
They called upon the special assistant on health to depute senior health officers at the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) for Polio Eradication and participate in review meetings with provincial chief secretaries and ministers of health following Supplementary Immunisation Activities (SIA).
The latest polio vaccination which was launched on June 7, drive ends today.
Around 223,000 vaccinators are taking part in the drive.
The POB acknowledged the government’s efforts to end polio, but said “more is needed to reach the levels of government leadership, drive, and use of real-time data” as efficiently witnessed in the country’s Covid-19 response.
It also urged the chief secretaries and ministers of health in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh “protect their hard-won gains by routinely reviewing the programme’s success in reaching chronically missed children in priority communities”.
Critical months ahead
The POB said more government staff need to be engaged in the programme at all levels of the immunisation drive as the next six months are “critical to stop transmission by 2022”.
Pakistan had hoped to eliminate polio back in 2018, when only 12 cases were reported. But in the years since there has been an uptick in new cases.
Several people in Pakistan consider vaccination to be against Islamic practices, and some even fear that the anti-polio campaign is part of a west-hatched conspiracy to control birth rates of Muslims by causing infertility with vaccinations.
Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan are the only two remaining countries in the world where polio is endemic, after Nigeria was last year declared free of the virus.
Target of militants
Pakistani militants often target polio teams and police assigned to protect them claiming the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilise children.
On June 9, two police officers were shot dead for providing security to a polio vaccination team in the northwestern Mardan district