Polio rampant

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has seemingly become aware of the elephant in the room and has written to provincial governments, exhorting them to redouble their efforts to eradicate polio. To say that this is shutting the door after the horse has long bolted understates the matter by cosmic proportions. Provincial governments are implored to work in close coordination with federal agencies and entities — something they have never done well or particularly willingly — and the implementation of the National Emergency Action Plan for polio vaccination remains as piecemeal as ever. The outbreak will tail off as the weather cools and we enter the season of low transmission, but this year has been hugely damaging for Pakistan in terms of our global reputation as a responsibly governed nation. There have now been 227 confirmed cases since January 2014. The Pakistani strain of the virus has been exported to Egypt, Syria and Afghanistan, and we are the leading global proliferator for the disease.



That there is a public health emergency is not in doubt, but there are some serious doubts in the international community about how it has been addressed. In a scathing report that pulled no punches, the Independent Monitoring Board for Polio Eradication (IMB) pointed to the shambles that the national programme was. It has so stung the Minister of State for National Health Services, Regulation and Coordination, Saira Afzal Tarar, that she is considering writing to the IMB to protest at “the kind of language” used in the report. She need not bother, and would be better employed providing the effective leadership that has thus far eluded herself and her staff. The bluntness of the IMB report is welcome — even if some of its recommendations are impractical — and should be a wake-up call for all concerned.

The prime minister’s letter is no more likely to have an effect on provincial administrations than a bucket of water on a forest fire, and the affronted bleatings of Ms Tarar will be rightly ignored. The current government has failed spectacularly badly in the fight against polio despite individual small local victories. And it need not have.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 30^th, 2014.

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