Unholy water: Sewage in Gadap tests positive for polio

WHO reports presence of virus in wastewater sample collected from rural town.

KARACHI:

A sample of sewage collected from the Gadap Town in Karachi has tested positive for the polio virus, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The organisation is covering the environmental aspects of the virus and its report has spread panic among the authorities concerned.

Sindh has shown some improvements in curbing the crippling disease. According to this year’s statistics, 16 polio cases have been reported in the country so far and only two of them were from Sindh – one in Mirpurkhas and the other in Hyderabad.

Dr Salah Mohammad, the WHO team leader for polio eradication, translates the presence of polio virus in sewage as a threat to the rest of the city and the country.  In some instances, the same virus dispersed from Karachi to rural Sindh, moving on to Balochistan and then crossing the border to emerge in China, he said.

Apart from Gadap, two more towns in the city – Gulshan-e-Iqbal and Baldia – have been declared “high-risk zones”.

Dr Salah Mohammad says three things helped the WHO team to identify the high-risk areas – cases reported, reach of immunisation campaigns and the environmental sampling.

Sukkur is also considered a high-risk area, he said, adding that usually when such a situation emerges, the most important step is to step up immunisation.

For the national anti-polio campaign starting from June 4, the WHO has formed vaccination teams that will work round the clock for the whole week.

The Khairpur, Jacobabad, Larkana and Kambar Shahdadkot districts will be specifically targeted to cover the vulnerable sections of the population as well as the movement from and into the province, said Dr Salah Mohammad. “As long as the children aged below five are immunised, the polio virus will not be harmful for the people even if it remains in the environment,” he explained.

“We are also hiring female vaccinators as a strategy to increase the success of the upcoming campaign,” he said.

Giving the example of Lyari, where the virus has not been reported since 1996, he said that the people there have the same socio-economic background as those in Gadap or Orangi towns, but the children in Lyari are immunised regularly. “This is a positive example,” he added.

Pakistan has made significant progress against the spread of the polio virus. This year, the number of polio cases reported so far has been half of the number reported over the same period last year. But the disease continues to threaten children across the country.

In 2011, the number of reported polio cases stood at 38, with 11 of them from Sindh. These figures are in sharp contrast to the beginning of 1994, when the number of polio cases in the country was nearly 3,000.

Although the country has made significant progress in the fight against polio, it still reported more polio cases than any other country in the world last year, and was the source of a polio outbreak in China.

At the World Health Assembly in Geneva, an annual gathering of global health leaders organised about a week ago, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative launched an ‘emergency action plan’ to boost polio immunisation coverage in Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan to the level needed to eradicate the virus.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 4^th, 2012.