A measles outbreak has killed 12 children in the North Waziristan tribal region and is spreading as fighting, power cuts and curfews cause a vaccine shortage, doctors said on Monday.
North Waziristan, which is infamous for its alleged Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries, is frequently hit by US drone strikes.
“For the past three weeks we are daily receiving five to 10 children suffering from measles,” said Dr Muhammad Ali Shah, chief of the agency headquarters hospital in Miramshah. He would normally see only one or two deaths a year from the disease, he said.
But another doctor, Mohammad Sadiq, said 12 children and a man had died from measles in the last three weeks, and that there were up to 70 confirmed cases in hospital.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF said there had been 143 measles alerts this year in the seven tribal agencies of the country.
The measles virus is highly contagious and can be fatal, but can easily be prevented by proper immunisation.
However Shah said: “We do not have proper storage for measles vaccination because of long power outages and curfews and most of our stock expires due to these reasons.”
Poverty and poor transport facilities mean villagers in the rugged, mountainous areas cannot come to hospitals for treatment, he added, while military operations and unrest mean vaccination teams cannot reach them.
“There is accumulation of significant number of unvaccinated children in different parts of this region which are revealing as outbreaks or alerts from time to time,” said Dr Quamrul Hasan of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
WHO and local health officials are to carry out a supplementary campaign in the tribal areas aimed at vaccinating more than a million children aged under 10 by the end of June, he said.
Polio vaccination campaigns in tribal areas have in the past suffered because of rumours – sometimes spread by radio stations or from mosque loudspeakers – they were a Western conspiracy to sterilise children to reduce the Muslim population.
But UNICEF said work had been done to tackle misconceptions and there was less suspicion of the measles vaccine, administered by injection, than of the orally-administered polio dose.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 15th, 2012.
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Thanks to foriegn NGO's operating as spies in Pakistan, the mistrust is great..
Biological warfare by the US???