September 27, 2007	Thursday	Ramazan 14, 1428

PESHAWAR, Sept 26: Health workers involved in the polio vaccination campaign in high-risk districts and tribal agencies say that they were facing problems for lack of cooperation from the people.

The government had launched a three-day immunisation campaign in Swat, Peshawar, Nowshera and Charsadda districts and Khyber, Bajaur and Mohmand agencies from September 24.

“These areas have been declared high-risk. We decided to run a special vaccination drive against polio,” said Dr Waheed Khan, deputy director of the NWFP Expanded Programme of Immunisation (EPI). He said that they had taken into confidence district governments in these areas to be able to ensure maximum immunisation.

Dr Khan said that they had also involved the religious leaders, who were urging the people in high-risk areas to immunise their children below the age of five and save them from being crippled by polio.

Sources, however, said that people in several localities of the Bajaur Agency and Swat district were opposed to the vaccination of their children. These areas have become hotbed for health workers, they said.

A health official at the directorate of health, Fata, said the political administration would make every effort to provide security to the people involved in the vaccination campaign in the agency.

“We still feel harassed because the people are reluctant to immunise their kids,” the official said quoting a health worker from the Bajaur Agency.

Polio vaccination in the Bajaur Agency was suspended in August after villagers broke the vaccination kit and held health workers for four hours in captivity in Sarkari Killa and Kotji Charming villages.

Clerics in the area are opposed polio campaign on the ground that oral polio vaccine (OPV) was a tool by the US to render people incapable of producing children.

Agency surgeon Dr Abdul Ghani Khan was killed in February this year in a polio-related incident along with a health worker. Two health workers had sustained injuries in that remote-controlled bomb explosion in the Salarzai tehsil of the Bajaur Agency.

Dr Waheed Khan said that polio vaccines had been manufactured and procured in line with international standard and didn’t harm the recipients as mistakenly perceived by some people. It was the responsibility of the parents to administer OPV to their children, he said.

Health officials and people, he said, should try to dispel rumours about the polio vaccination and save the children from the disease which causes permanent disability in future. The disease has been eliminated in developed nations but persists in parts of India, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he added.

A health official in Bajaur said that Pakistan was close to eradication of polio. He said that the agency had not reported any case this year and stressed to immunise all children in the agency.

He said that they had already declared the Bajaur Agency as one of the high-risk zones in the tribal agencies, where a five confirmed polio cases had been reported last year.

The NWFP and Fata, he said, had reported five polio cases this year. Sources said that the number of refusals could increase in Bajaur and Swat, because of the poor publicity campaign.

“Even in Peshawar, some of the reputed schools don’t allow vaccination of students. Recently, the health department sent them letters to allow vaccination teams to their schools,” a source said.