Daily Times

Polio is again in the news. In fact, it has never gone away. In the last year, however, it made repeated headlines, bringing the year’s tally to 144. In 2018, national polio cases were 12 and in 2017 only eight. This year’s count so far is 17, including the five cases reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan just last week. Monday was the year’s first five-day nationwide polio vaccination drive’s first day to vaccinate approximately 39.6 million children. Up to 265,000 polio workers are braving various risks, hardships and low wages and going door to door to inoculate children under the age of five. Viewing the situation, national polio control authorities need to change their strategies and pursue aggressive measures to defeat the crippling virus in 2020, making the country free from polio once and for all. It is an international shame for us that Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries with polio virus still present.

Of the two, Afghanistan is showing progress in dropping polio cases despite its being under violent conflicts in most parts of the country. On the other hand, our government has control over 100 per cent of the territory and polio teams reach all parts of the country, and still the situation is dismal. The mother of all problems is people’s perception towards the vaccine. They draw their biases from social media and unfounded religious beliefs. This time, popular media has done a great national service by airing the messages of religious scholars, opinion makers and artists urging the public to help the government eradicate polio virus and save the young people from the disease.

Apart from the media campaign, the government needs to focus on the current geographical spread and the intensity of the virus, which makes every child under five vulnerable to it. It is necessary that polio teams reach every child in the nationwide door-to-door campaign. This is the only way to protect the children from lifelong paralysis. Other than geographical spread, the other problems aggravating the polio war are density and temperature. The level of density in our urban and rural areas makes the condition for polio spread much more likely. But Balochistan has population clusters and the occurrence of cases from districts are mostly due to refusal to administer the vaccine. It is mainly apprehension on part of parents that has given polio a walkover in our part of the world. *