Losing the war against polio

In another statistic, which shows just how far behind the rest of the world we have fallen, over 1.4 million children missed polio vaccinations in the country during the first polio drive of the year. This number does not include the 260,000 children in North and South Waziristan, who cannot be vaccinated as teams cannot go into the area. Indeed, the security situation is one of the major reasons for the setbacks in the elimination of polio from the country, with Pakistan being one of the three countries where polio is endemic.

There seems to be no end in sight to the difficulties in administering polio vaccinations. On April 19, a team of polio vaccinators was attacked in Tank, leaving two levies personnel injured. Earlier, four people opened fire at a polio team in Karachi, while on April 17, three people were injured when villagers themselves pelted polio vaccinators with stones in Benazirabad district. Clearly, conspiracy theories built around polio drops have taken strong hold in the minds of many, with groups protesting the vaccinations across the country. The people must be educated on the need for polio drops, for the price of ignorance here is too high. The security problems in the tribal areas preventing the vaccinators from carrying out their duties are another matter, where the fight against militancy and polio coincides.

Whilst most of the gaps in the campaign are due to security concerns, some also have to do with a delay in training of teams, which should be given the utmost priority given the importance of the matter. Furthermore, the work of the vaccinators and the security details given to protect them cannot be appreciated enough, for they are putting their lives at risk to ensure the health of our children. It must be ensured that the workers have adequate security to enable them to carry out their work. Those who lose out the most in all this are, of course, the children, and it is heartbreaking to see polio cases when we know that they could have been prevented had the child been vaccinated.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2013.