KARACHI: Fearing lives of millions of children at risk, the Sindh health ministry has requested its counterparts in Punjab and Balochistan to provide ‘on loan’ syringes required for administering Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), which is a vaccine primarily used against tuberculosis among children, it emerged on Friday.

The office of the expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of the Sindh health ministry has written a letter to the governments of Punjab and Balochistan asking for a supply of 15,000 auto-destructible BCG syringes (0.05cc) on a loan basis to Sindh.

“Auto-destructible syringes may kindly be supplied on a loan basis to this province as help for smoothly running of the EPI programme in Sindh. And, the same will be returned on receipt of syringes as soon as possible,” said the project director of the Sindh EPI in a letter to the two provinces.

Officials said the syringes required had not been received from the federal EPI Cell Islamabad for the past one year to Sindh, making it harder for the authorities to keep the vaccine part of the project of nine vaccines being administered to children in the province.

“This vaccine [BCG] could not be administered with any other syringe,” a senior official in the Sindh health ministry told Dawn. He said a tiny increase in the dose could be harmful for the baby, thus ordinary syringes could not serve the purpose.

Sources in the provincial government said the health ministry had earlier received 1,500 BCG syringes from Balochistan, of which 1,000 were sent to Thar, where children were in extreme danger, and the remaining 500 were sent to Thar’s neighbouring Umerkot district.

Before that, said the sources, the authorities had purchased 25,000 BCG syringes from the open market as a ‘stopgap measure’ and sent them to all districts; however, the stock soon ran out.

They added that the province had been requesting Islamabad to send the syringes required for the life-saving vaccine to Sindh but the officials there left their calls unheard.

“It is our policy to administer BCG through those specified syringes as other syringes could not ensure proper dose and endanger children’s health,” said a source, adding that children were not given BCG without the syringes.

The officials conceded that lives of a million newborn babies were at risk because of Islamabad’s delays in procurement of syringes.

They added that there were possibilities that in many districts many newborn babies had not been vaccinated against TB because of the unavailability of the syringes.

Some officials said that the government was highly vigilant towards polio vaccination, but had put routine immunisation on the back burner.

The state of routine immunisation had historically been dismal in Sindh and such a situation had affected it further, the officials added.

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2016