ISLAMABAD: Refusal of polio vaccination to children declined in the country this year, an encouraging development but not significant enough to raise hopes for quick eradication of the crippling disease.

Data available by Dawn says that 36,510 parents refused the vaccine in February compared with 54,061 in January.

Greatest resistance to the national immunisation campaigns was observed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa - where almost 26,000 parents refused the vaccine in February – and the least in Punjab, 798.

Also read: Polio narrative

Corresponding figure for Balochistan was 4,800, Sindh 4,342 and Fata 635.

Many of them could have been persisting in their refusal. However slightly, the refusals sadly increased in Punjab and Fata.

What could be worrying is the number of children missed during the February campaign because they were not at home - 155,846 in Punjab, 85,844 in Sindh, 62,795 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 15,764 in Fata and 14,466 in Balochistan.

Together twice more children were missed in February than in January.

This situation prompted Prime Minister’s Focal Person for Polio Eradication Ayesha Raza Farooq to ask the provincial and Fata authorities to redouble their efforts to convert the refusals into acceptance and reach the missed ones.

A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) communicated to them instructs that vaccination teams should record the address, phone number of children in the household refusing the vaccine for the area in-charge to visit them the same day, along with Partners’ communications staff wherever available, to win over the family.

If they fail in the effort, the district administration has to be taken on board for pursuing the refusing family during the next campaign.

It has been a practice that a two-day catch-up campaign follows the three-day immunisation campaigns.

Manager of the National Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) Dr Rana Mohammad Safdar told Dawn that all the attention is now on the refusals and missing children as they can spread the dreaded polio virus.

“We will ensure that not a single child is missed,” he said. “In the case of refusals, social and administrative influence will be used to vaccinate children.”

Things have started improving since 2014 when 43 per cent children were vaccinated and the effort during 2015 is to cover 63 per cent of the children who initially refused the vaccination.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2015

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