December 4, 2001	Tuesday	Ramazan 18, 1422

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MULTAN, Dec 3: Punjab Health Department highups are trying to conceal the actual number of polio cases, specially in Dera Ghazi Khan division.

When contacted, paediatricians of various state-run health facilities in Muzaffargarh, Leiah, Rajanpur and Dera Ghazi Khan districts told Dawn that they had been directed by authorities not to report acute flaccid paralysis cases anymore.

A Rajanpur health official quoted one of the senior-most officer of the department as saying: “Don’t put your as well as our job at risk.”

Punjab Health Services Director-General Dr Yaqoob Jaffar had on Nov 26 claimed that there were only 28 polio cases reported from all over the province.

According to the DG, nine polio cases were reported from Dera Ghazi Khan, eight from Rajanpur, three from Muzaffargarh and two from Rahim Yar Khan by the third week of November.

Ironically, some 23 polio cases had been reported only at one health facility of Dera Ghazi Khan district by that time. The names of the affected children and their fathers with ages in parenthesis are:

Savera (10 months) d/o Ghulam Shabbir; Shahbaz (8 months) s/o Mukhtar; Munir Husain (4 months) s/o Abdul Rasheed; Asma Bibi (2 years) d/o Haji Bashir Ahmad.

Tauqeer Abbas (2 years) s/o Qasim Ali; Abubakar (1 year) s/o Habibullah; Mazhar Husain (2 years) s/o Khuda Bakhsh; Samiullah (2 years) s/o Abdul Hameed.

Ali Raza (2 years) s/o Wahid Bakhsh Khosa; Farzana (1 year) d/o Ghulam Shabbit Khokar; Anjum (2 years) d/o Abid; Azra (10 months) d/o Ghulam Yasin Ghillu.

Nasreen (1 year) d/o Manzoor Husain; Noreen (2 years) d/o Roshan Khan; Saeed Farid (9 months) s/o Farid Pathan; Rizwan (1 year) s/o Altaf Husain.

Asad Abbas (1 year) s/o Kausar Abbas; Hammad (13 months) s/o Abid; Sultan Rind (2 year) s/o Suleman; Nasreen (1 year) d/o Ghulam Anwar Giani; Shabana (2.5 years) d/o Allah Ditta; Sumera Bibi (1 year) d/o Ghulam Akbar; Mohsin Shahzad (10 months) s/o Manzoor Ahmad.

There are around 100 state-run health facilities in Dera Ghazi Khan. Survey reports of the project wing of the health department revealed that the state-run health facilities hardly provide one-fourth of the total health coverage in the Punjab.

Punjab Health Minister Prof Dr Mahmood Chaudhry had said that the private sector had been catering to the needs of 65 per cent patients in the province. The acute flaccid paralysis cases reported at the state-run facilities might not depict the actual picture of the alarming number of polio cases in the province. There was no surveillance system to check polio cases reported to the private sector health facilities.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, a case of P1 polio may represent 200 infected children while the P3 type may represent 1,000 infected children.

In this type of infection, 90 per cent of the affected children have no signs of illness. Most of them are not aware that they have been affected with polio virus. But they are a potential threat for others as despite being asymptomatic the polio virus remains in their stools.

“These asymptomatic polio-carriers mat cause the disease to unprotected or not immunized children,” a paediatrician said.

The polio virus has three stains- P1, P2 and P3. The world wide experience in polio eradication is that the first polio virus which disappears is P2 followed by P1 and P3, respectively.

Sources at the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, said all types of polio virus were reported from different parts of the country.

A senior paediatrician at Nishter Hospital, Multan, said that P3 polio virus was difficult to be eliminated. Reported cases of the paralytic disease owing to P1 virus and its asymptomatic carriers could widely spread the disease than other types of the disease.

When contacted, a number of paediatricians alleged that the health department officers concerned neither succeded in maintaining the cold chain nor properly supervised the polio immunization campaigns.