Polio threat still real — and so are fears about vaccine

LAHORE, Pakistan — They gathered in a small room in one of this city’s worst slums, a dozen mothers sitting crosslegged with toddlers and newborns on their laps, listening to advice about polio prevention.

“Keep your children from playing in garbage cans and sewer drains,” said Saddaf Malik, a brightly dressed young woman from UNICEF.

Simple enough — but then came the questions, spiked with suspicion and indicative of why Pakistan remains one of three countries — along with Afghanistan and Nigeria — where the paralyzing disease still thrives.

Why, some mothers wondered, were the vaccination teams coming back once a month, instead of every three months as they used to? Were the repeated doses of the red drops meant to induce sterility in Muslims?

“This is really alarming,” the district’s chief health officer, Muhammad Saeed Akhtar Ghumman, said in his office later when a UNICEF staffer reported the women’s concerns to him.

Troubling, too, was the confirmation of the polio virus in 16 of 28 sewage samples taken so far this year in Lahore, a marked increase over 2011.

Overall trends in Pakistan, where nearly 30 million children have been vaccinated in recent years, are encouraging. In 1994, when the nation was fully engaged in the scourge, polio killed or paralyzed at least 1,500 children, by conservative estimates. This year’s tally is 54.

But the intractability of other social ills, including illiteracy and inadequate sanitation, has conspired to ensure that the country remains years away from meeting its optimistic goal of polio eradication by the dawn of 2013.

Rumors abound that the polio drops contain religiously proscribed (non-halal) ingredients or are part of a Western plot to spread infertility and limit Muslim population growth.

A CIA-paid Pakistani doctor’s hepatitis immunization campaign, launched to try to collect Osama bin Laden’s DNA before his killing last year, also gave a boost to conspiracy theorists and religious leaders who advise parents not to vaccinate their children.

One key to reducing outbreaks, U.N. health workers say, is to educate parents such as the ethnic Pashtuns at the session in Lahore. Pashto speakers have accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s polio cases in the past three years, officials report.