Polio travel requirement

It took a very substantial boot applied to the proverbial national political fundament to get things moving, but moving they finally are. Fighting — and killing — the Hydra of polio is a battle fought on many fronts, some with more success than others. The collective failure of provincial and federal governments to prevent Pakistan infecting other countries with polio is what provoked the travel restrictions imposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO); and which our government was so spectacularly unprepared for. There was doubtless a sigh of relief that other countries did not immediately drop the hammer and start to refuse entry to Pakistani travellers without the appropriate polio vaccination/documentation, and our government now seem to be getting its act together.

Well it needs to. Two new cases of polio were reported on May 13, one in Fata where the army is now reportedly carrying out a campaign of immunisation, and one in Karachi, a child in a family recently migrated from Fata. The first is good news — the army being proactive — the second bad, and illustrative of the vulnerability of populations to the movement of unvaccinated children. The federal government has now made it mandatory for everybody moving out of the country from June 1, 2014 to be able to produce a valid polio vaccination certificate. This applies to adults and children alike. This is to a degree shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it is at least several steps in the right direction and, if applied with due rigour, will hopefully stem the flow of infection from Pakistan to the rest of the world. There is to be a World Health Association (WHA) assembly from May 19-24, a good opportunity for Pakistan to present credible evidence of compliance with the WHO-recommended restrictions, and a good place to present confidence-building measures (CBMs) to the international community. The polio-associated travel restrictions are very much a self-inflicted wound. Pakistan came very close to eliminating polio six years ago, but lost the initiative to extremism and obscurantism. It is not impossible to retake lost ground; a process we hope is well underway.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2014.

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