PESHAWAR, June 4: Children are dying of measles in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to low vaccination coverage against the childhood ailment, officials and Paediatricians said.

“At least 12 children have died of measles in the teaching hospitals in Peshawar during the past one month. Many such deaths went unrecorded,” said an office-bearer of the Pakistan Paediatrics Association (PPA) of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chapter.

We had communicated to expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of the health department regarding measles outbreak in parts of the province and have suggested mop up campaigns in areas from where majority of the cases were being reported.

EPI’s head Dr Jan Baz Afridi confirmed outbreaks of measles in some areas and said that 740 cases, including Dera Ismail Khan (144), Nowshera (82), Dir Lower (69), Haripur (61) and Charsadda (52) had been recorded in the first quarter of 2012 and immunisation drives had been conducted accordingly, he said.

Lack of awareness about vaccination was also one of the factors for surge in measles patients, he said.

Low vaccination against measles was a major reason as only 74 per cent children get immunised. Vaccination was the only protection, he said. Other vaccines like BCG and oral polio vaccine coverage is more than 95 per cent in the province.

The people, he said, should administer measles vaccine to their children at the age of 9 and 15 months to safeguard them against the disease.

Paediatricians say that measles often killed victims within days. “Teaching hospitals have dedicated beds to measles-affected children where they are kept separate from other patients as the disease is highly contagious,” a PPA official said.

The health department, he said, was preoccupied with anti-polio campaigns and had ignored measures aiming to prevent other childhood disease.

“Polio still haunted children in the province despite unprecedented vaccination campaigns. At the same time, the government had weakened the immunisation programme for other seven diseases at the cost of polio,” he said.

The PPA, he added, was of the view that vaccine was the only way to safeguard children against measles because the ailment had no proper cure.

About symptoms, he said the children developed skin rashes, high-grade fever, cough, redness of eyes and flu which caused death within hours if they were not rushed to the hospital.

They are given supportive treatment, such as antibiotics and fluids to prevent the attacks of pneumonia and diarrhoea because the affected children suffer from low-immunity and could die of other infections, like TB, he said. The children who remained immunised can develop the disease till the age of 13 years and all the people in same age group must be immunised, he said.