A policeman stands guard as a member of a polio vaccination team administers drops to a child during a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Karachi. PHOTO: AFP
KARACHI: Despite Sindh government's efforts to carry out an anti-polio drive, many residents of Gabol Town refused to have anti-polio drops administered to their children, Express News reported on Sunday.
They also misbehaved with health workers administering polio vaccines and strictly forbade them from vaccinating their children.
In the wake of attacks on polio teams in the city, the provincial government had decided to launch day-long anti-polio campaigns in the ‘high risk’ areas.
The Sindh government imposed ban on motorcycle riding in the area where the campaign is being conducted. Hundreds of police personnel, commandos and Rangers personnel have been deployed for the security of the polio teams.
Earlier, District Central deputy commissioner had announced that parents would face arrests without a warrant if they refused to have polio vaccines administered to their children during the drive in the district. However, no arrests have been arrested so far.
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Laws, laws, and more laws is not the solution. IT IS A PROBLEM. Where is the IMPLEMENTATION. The parents are quite well educated and understand the frightful need for child vaccination and immunization against dreaded diseases. But the problem lies in the false and malicious rumors spread by the militants, terrorists, and pro-Taliban opposition parties. salams
Is this because of the rumor that the West is making Muslims not able to bear children with this polio drops? What do the educated Pakistanis think?
Majority of the parents, refusing Polio, living in Sindh are from other provinces. I am sorry to say, because of them, Sindh is being named as Polio-hit province. They should cooperate, or better be going to their provinces.
@Muhammad: Do parents have a right to harm the life of their children?
ET mods- Please allow rebuttal to the strange logic used by @Muhammad.
@Muhammad: Parents do not own their children and do not have a right to choose sickness rather than health for the children. Further by preventing elimination of polio, they are also putting other kids at risk. This is because even a kid who has been vaccinated but suffers diarrhoea due to poor water quality maynot have retained the dose. So vaccination toyr own kid is necessary but not sufficient to ensure that your child is polio free - in an environment where vaccination is not universal.
Anyway, as unfortunate as this refusal o get kids vaccinated is, it is better than killing the polio workers.
Hope better sense prevails. The kids deserve better.
About Dr. Shakeel Afridi episode, what do you expect? If they come to my house, I will definitely not entertain them. I will rather go to private hospital and get my kids vaccinated rather than trusting on these govt. backed secret service man-hunt missions !!
@Muhammad: Parents who do not care for the future of children do not deserve to be parents. Govt should take away their children and take care of them themselves.
Such parents should be charged with child abuse and penalized by law.
@Muhammad:
Rubbish - that's like arguing that Pakistan has a sovereign right to harbor terrorist. The reality is that you don't have the right to take actions which unjustly harm your neighbors - period.
@Farhan: But somebody should ask these parents the reason for their refusal. I fail to understand why would a parent want his/her child to have polio!
but OPV can sometimes cause polio compared to IPV.
@Muhammad: In special circumstances parents can refuse vaccination of their children but not those families who live in large communities. For example in North America families who live in isolated places or in reserves can refuse vaccination but they have to keep away their children from main stream communities.
Outrageous. Such parents should be expelled from the city.
State is like a mother, and the people are required to respond to the Government call for any cause of general good. Polio is a highly contagious disease, which spreads from person to person and polio virus can spread in one of several ways, including eating or drinking, touching liquids or objects contaminated with polio virus. Hence, the Government is duty bound to save the public from this communicable disease. The people's choice does not hold or gain ground in such welfare cases.
@Muhammad: They can refuse all they want. But restrictions must be enforced on their movement within Pakistan. They must live in quarantined community
@Muhammad: That right is foregone when other people's children are at stake.
This is a crime to the young one's, it is similar to intentional damage to your children. We should have laws to enforce Polio vaccination.
Parents have a right to refuse vaccination g their children. Their should be a public awareness campaign to educate parents about the benefit of vaccination.
This is very unfortunate. Getting children vaccinated or not is not a decision for the parents to make. Every child as a citizen of Pakistan is the responsibility of the state of Pakistan and the state is responsible for providing the basic right to health to these children. NO parents can make this decision. It is the decision of the state and everyone is bound to comply with it. If our govt had any sense of responsibility left in it and if there was any system in place, these parents would not have dared to misbehave with the team and refuse vaccination for their children. Such parents need to be put behind the bars.