PESHAWAR: An advertisement appearing in a Peshawar-based Urdu daily newspaper concerning anti-polio campaign can leave adverse impact on the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s immunisation efforts as there is no mention of the source which issued it to the press.

The advertisement is seen as damaging given the polio-related situation in the country as the provincial and federal governments and their supporting partner organisations, including the World Health Organisation and Unicef, don’t know about its source. The advertisement with a tag of ‘Rifa-i-Aama’ Or for public welfare, urge the people to administer two drops of oral polio vaccine (OPV) to their children under age five in every immunisation drive to save them from being crippled.

“If we showed laxity in giving anti-polio drops to our children today, we would be repenting it tomorrow and for our whole life,” the advertisement says. It also says that a three-day countrywide polio eradication campaign will start from April 27.

The advertisement clearly portrays that there is lack of ownership of the anti-polio vaccination campaign which had suffered a great deal in the past due to similar reasons.

“We haven’t issued it,” Unicef spokesman Azmat Abbas told Dawn. WHO senior coordinator for polio in Pakistan Dr Elias Durry said his organisation didn’t know about the advertisement. “We are technical partners of the government and supposed to fulfill the government’s requirements to ensure that every child get vaccine,” he said.

Mazhar Nisar, spokesman for the PM’s polio cell, also said that the federal government had no role in it. “It is the responsibility of the provincial governments to know about such advertisements,” he told Dawn.

It also showcases the credibility of the polio programme as people don’t know who is urging them to get their children immunised. The provincial health department does not even know that a campaign will be run on the days given in the advertisement.

The ad also poses a threat to the polio teams as it has mentioned the dates of the campaign thereby exposing vaccinators to miscreants’ attacks, who had killed about 32 policemen and vaccinators in polio-related campaigns in the country.

The anti-polio campaign has already suffered due to its alleged linkage with Dr Shakil Afridi who ran a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign to reach Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. Taliban had banned vaccination in North Waziristan Agency in June 2012, arguing it was US’ plot to spy on Taliban and kill them in drone strikes.

Since then, the North Waziristan Agency has recorded over 100 cases because 160,000 children have not received OPV. Pakistan has been facing a gigantic task to eradicate polio because the people continue to have misconceptions about the campaign.

The people were also under the misconception that it was a programme run by the Western countries to render the vaccine recipients impotent. This has caused a severe damage to the 20-year-old polio eradication efforts.

The people want ownership of the campaign as such advertisements tend to jeopardise the situation further. There are over 65,000 countrywide refusal cases against OPV, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which had 35,000 chronic refusals.

It was because of the programme ownership and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman Imran Khan spearheading it that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has been able to immunise 700,000 children in every campaign under its Sehat Ka Insaf programme. The success is largely because of Imran’s loud and clear message to the parents that the Sehat Ka Insaf programme is aimed at safeguarding their children from vaccine preventable diseases.

None of the 14,000 vaccinators and 6,000 policemen was targeted by miscreants since the launch of the Sehat Ka Insaf campaign in February because there is complete ownership as the PTI local workers and its leadership stand firmly behind it.