PESHAWAR, July 22: Pakistan's failure in its efforts to eradicate polio is a challenge for the government and donor agencies. This was stated at a meeting held here on Thursday with health minister Inayatullah in the chair.

The meeting was attendedby representatives of various donor agencies, including Dr M. H Wahdan special adviser to regionaldirector on polio, Dr Khalif Bile Mohammad, WHO's representative in Pakistan, Dr Rehan A. Hafiz, EPI national programme manger and Dr Rafah Aziz Unicef chief of health nutrition.

The participantsin their presentations shed light on the polio scenario at the global level and believed that in some of thehot spots, such as Nigeria, the disease was still posing a big challenge. However, they expressed satisfaction over global situation, sayingthat very soon the target of zero level at the global level would be achieved.

The discussants laid emphasis over polio situation in Afghanistan and conceded that in the present circumstances it was impossible to carry out street level campaign in that country. They also lauded India for bringingdown polio incidence, but at the same time underlined that some long intervals in dispensation had caused the disease to re-emerge in that country.

They also pointed out that improvement was needed to be brought to overcome the managerial shortcomings and some other factors, like failure of the vaccination were also cited as causes of the failure.

According to the participants, malnutrition, diarrhoea, slow pace of developing anti-bodies and shortage of breast feeding could be the cause that some children had been diagnosed as positive despite having had several doses of the polio drops.

They believed that in some cases this has been observed that the vaccines do not respond to the virus quickly and suggested that in such cases additionaldrops should be given the children.

While discussing polio eradication drive in the Frontier, deputy director of the EPI, Dr Waheed Khan said that during the current year so far seven polio confirmed cases have been reported from cities such as Peshawar, Bannu, D. I. Khan and Mansehra.

According to him, the total number of polio cases was 31 in 2002 and 33 in 2003.

Regarding cases' detection and investigation, he claimed that both of these had been reduced and 95 per cent quality standard has also been achieved.

Dr Khan, however, conceded that one of the big problem was the missing of the children on National Immunisation Days (NIDs), saying that despite masses awareness campaign, the vaccination teams were still finding it hard toadminister vaccines to all children of the same family.

Citing other reasons hampering the polio campaigns, he said that in some of the remote and rural areas, the local elders were opposed to involvement of female staff inthecampaign. Subsequently, entry was denied to the polio vaccinators in the rural areas which resulted in missing children from polio vaccination.

He also said that in the wake of limited resources, the vaccination staff did not reach the children living in remote and harder areas.