NOTHING, it seems, is going to shake the government out of its torpor over a crisis that is rapidly spiralling out of control. Polio has been in the headlines for a considerable length of time now, with evidence mounting over the years that a highly infectious disease Pakistan once appeared on the verge of eradicating is in resurgence. Pakistan was recently placed on a list of countries poised to re-infect the world at large, and the World Health Organisation recommended a travel ban on people who do not have proof of vaccination. This was a deeply worrying development, and the expectation was that the government would immediately and concertedly turn its attention towards it. Yet, other than half-baked attempts at facilitating travellers by providing vaccinations and certificates at designated points, we have not seen much forward progress on the issue, as newly detected cases in KP and Fata show. Indeed, challenges that ought to already have been overcome, and gaps that should have been plugged, continue to present themselves.

Consider, for example, the case of a one-year-old boy who has become the seventh child to be diagnosed with polio in Karachi this year. His family left Swat in the wake of the military operation there, and once in the metropolis, the men responsible for his safety refused to let the vaccine be administered to him. Nevertheless, polio vaccination teams took advantage of the times when only the women were home, and he received three doses of the OPV. He has nevertheless contracted polio, which means that the efficacy of the vaccine had been compromised. One explanation is obvious, say doctors: the cold-chain storage procedure in which the polio vaccine is kept was interrupted. Has this occurred to anyone at the administrative level, provincial or federal, even as there is much talk of vaccinating the thousands of children flowing into the provinces from North Waziristan? That certainly does not appear to be the case. In its inattentiveness, Pakistan is risking even more isolation.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2014