KARACHI: In contrast to her harsh criticism of the Sindh government three months back, Minister of State for National Health Services, Saira Afzal Tarar, was on Friday all praise for the provincial authorities for its improved performance in polio vaccination.

She, however, warned there were still a few districts and neighbourhoods where the situation needed to be improved.

Speaking at a press conference at the provincial health department’s offices in the Sindh secretariat, Ms Tarar claimed that overall health indicators of Pakistan had got better during the past few months, which also included progress in otherwise routine immunisation.

She said the situation in Karachi had become ‘much better’ after a host of actions taken by the federal and the provincial governments to boost polio immunisation in particular for the fact that Karachi produced 23 out of 30 polio cases in Sindh last year.

She said the Sindh government and all agencies taking care of healthcare and security matters had shown great coordination, which ultimately reflected in the results of the recent National Immunisation Days and special campaigns in the eight high-risk union councils of the city.

She said in most parts of the province polio vaccination was more than 90 per cent, however, certain neighbourhoods of Karachi, like Muzaffarabad Colony, Muslimabad Colony and Gadap and Qambar-Shahdadkot district, which produced this year’s so far only polio case in the province, were still posing problems.

She, however, said the countrywide ratio of refusals in polio campaigns had declined from a previous 1.7 million to 100,000 after the authorities managed to get access to many past no-go areas in the country’s northwest and Karachi and immunised children. The Tirah valley in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas was still among the areas inaccessible for security reasons, she added.

Observing great progress in vaccination campaigns, Ms Tarar said the authorities had decided to merge polio campaigns into routine immunisation as the latter was still a reason to worry as around half of the targeted population still went unattended for various reasons.

In the same programme, she said, maternal, neonatal and nutrition segments were being merged into one to improve the country’s healthcare indicators.

She said the routine immunisation in Sindh was a dismal 29pc, which, with the measures being taken by the authorities, would increase to respectable levels.

She said that luckily there had been no fresh polio case in Karachi since October. There was time when half of the city could not be vaccinated against polio but now the same neighbourhoods had shown result of more than 90pc vaccination, she said.

The country had produced 13 polio cases so far this year, while in the same corresponding period the number was 35. However, Sindh produced one case, while the first case in the province last year was reported in May.

She said the authorities were in contact with the USAID to evaluate weaknesses in the system through third-party evaluation of immunisation campaigns. The project would be in place within two months, she said.

About shortage of BCG – tuberculosis vaccine – in the country, she said that it was because of a worldwide shortage of the vaccine but it was being overcome now. The federal government had dispatched an ample quantity of vaccine vials to the provinces, she said.

To a question about how the Shakeel Afridi episode had harmed the polio cause, in which CIA used him in its manhunt for Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May 2011, she said it was all water under the bridge now and it was time to move on.

Sindh health minister, Jam Mehtab Dahar, said the provincial government was using all resources available to improve its healthcare system. Sindh would soon become a polio free province, he claimed.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2015

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