19 February 2004	Thursday	27 Zilhaj 1424

PESHAWAR, Feb 18: The crippling ailment of polio continues to haunt the children in the NWFP as two polio cases were reported in the province last month, officials said.

Both the cases were confirmed by the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, in January, they said. One child, who was diagnosed as a confirmed polio case, belongs to Peshawar district and the other hails from Nowshera district.

They said the one in Peshawar, who was diagnosed as positive, had been given 17 doses of the anti-polio drops and wondered how the child got the disease after having had 17 doses of the drops.

Last year, the NWFP had 32 polio cases, the largest number in any province, the officials said, adding that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was spending 65 per cent of its total budget on polio campaign in the country.

"There is a possibility that the child who was diagnosed as positive may have had diarrhoea at the time of administering anti-polio drops to him," the officials said. According to them, more often the drops remain ineffective when its recipients are malnourished or suffer from low-immunity.

"There must be a solution to this problem, because the WHO, Unicef, etc., who are the main donors in the polio campaigns, have expressed their apprehensions about the polio prevalence in the country, specially in the Frontier province," said a source at the health department.

He said the children suffering from diarrhoea, malnutrition and immunity problems should either be treated before administering vaccines to them or be put in a high-risk groups and be handled by specially-constituted polio vaccinators.

The officials said the government had pledged to eradicate polio from Pakistan by Dec 2004, but indication were that the crippling ailment would continue to haunt the country in the wake of poor vaccination campaign.

Shortage of staff, the officials said, was the main problem due to which the Enhanced Polio Immunization's (EPI's) vaccinators were not reaching to every child. The NWFP had appointed 800 EPI workers at the time of launching the programme in the province in early eighties, who were required to vaccinate every child below the age of five year, constituting 17 per cent of the total population.

The population, he said, had since doubled, but the staff had not been increased. "The NWFP health department has failed to devise a strategy for the utilization of funds amounting to Rs337.6 million allocated under the Bill Gates-sponsored Gavi programme.

The PC-1 for Gavi also includes appointment of 157 more workers to cope with the increasing workload," said a source at the health department.

Through Gavi, 337 new EPI centres would be established in the province to cope with the situation, but owing to the non-seriousness of the health managers the people were suffering, the source said.

Likewise, he said, the EPI's workers had to cover a lot of distance to reach to the children on foot, and added that these workers were also underpaid. On the contrary, the sources said, most of the people, such as some in the directorate of health and some blue-eyed NGOs' workers were being given handsome allowances for doing nothing.