Daily Times

Adding to the long list of the country’s mounting problems, Pakistan’s health ministry has officially confirmed the first case of polio in 2023. The victim was a three-year-old boy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, an area that has been historically neglected by the government’s vaccination drive much too often due to people’s resistance to vaccines and other times due to external threats. Just last year, militants opened fire at a polio vaccination team, killing three in Pakistan’s northwest where insecurity and misinformation are widespread and offer serious challenges to authorities trying to access children who need the vaccine. Polio campaigns have been falsely portrayed as a western conspiracy that is intended to sterilise children-needless to say, this could not be any further from the truth and is merely a symptom of the public’s discontentment with the state.

Polio’s insidious nature lies in the fact that it is an extremely contagious disease; for each person who displays paralytic symptoms of polio, there are as many as two hundred others who are asymptomatic and may still transmit the infection to other people. The polio vaccine is also harder to administer than certain others-unless it is refrigerated, it loses its efficacy. Pakistan is one of two countries, alongside neighbouring Afghanistan, where the deliberating neurodegenerative disease is still endemic. Unlike countries with advanced health systems that have integrated polio immunisation into paediatric care, developing countries continue to rely on campaigns for mass immunisation, mobilising campaign workers who are expected to inoculate thousands of children in a single day.

But despite national governments’ support for vaccination programmes, there is still strong opposition to vaccines in Pakistan. More than seventy polio workers have been targeted in the country since 2012. A ban on vaccinations by the TTP has further hindered eradication efforts in Pakistan, which prohibited vaccinations in North Waziristan, later extending to the south, effectively setting back global public health efforts by decades, Mistrust of polio workers is almost always higher in conflict-ridden regions such as KPK where people feel disenfranchised and neglected by the government. It is the state’s responsibility to stress the importance of the vaccine and launch a counter-information campaign that seeks to remedy the damage polio propaganda has caused. *