March, 21 2005	Monday	10 Safar 1426

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RAWALPINDI, March 20: The Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Atlanta, has overruled a report of the WHO Regional Reference Laboratory on a polio positive case in the city, documents show. Rawalpindi had been lucky to have not had any polio case for the past four years thanks to an intensive vaccination campaign. However, the WHO Regional Reference Laboratory recently claimed to have detected wild polio virus type-1 from a sample collected from the city threatening to spoil the good run the city had against polio. The district health department contested the WHO claim and the matter was referred to the CDC. The results received from there vindicated the health department’s stance that the virus detected by the WHO was not wild polio virus.

The dispute started when Noreen, a three-year-old girl from Dhoke Elahi Bukhsh, died shortly after being admitted to the Rawalpindi General Hospital with weakness of all four limbs. Since the child had died two hours after admission, laboratory investigations to ascertain the cause of death could not be done. However, the paediatrician had provisionally diagnosed the case as myocarditis and death due to cadiogenic shock.

The WHO took five samples of the contact cases that also included the parents though the organization was bound by its own guidelines to take the samples of individuals over 15 years of age.

The WHO laboratory initially detected wild polio virus type-1 and type 3. However, the district health department contested the report saying that both the strains of virus could not co-exist being incompatible.

The department based its contention on the fact that there was no clinical evidence of polio in this case. Besides, sudden death in case of polio was very rare and it was only possible in case of bulbar poliomyelitis, but since the respiratory muscles were not involved in this case, there was no chance of it either.

Noreen, the department said, had already taken 20 doses, while the contact child from whose stool sample wild virus was detected had also received the similar number of doses besides the routine EPI vaccination.

The health officials questioned the efficacy of the vaccine saying that if so many doses could not protect a child from polio then what would be the minimum number of doses required for making a child completely immune from this deadly crippling disease.

The dispute finally came to an end with the CDC report that the virus in the stool samples was Sabin-like type 3 meaning that it was a non-wild polio virus. The report gave the health officials a sigh of relief, as they had been discouraged by the WHO results.