PESHAWAR: The administration has stopped arresting parents over refusing polio vaccination to their children after community’s reaction to such action and threats to the health workers.

It is now banking on the union council level committees comprising clerics, elected representatives and members of the district administration to convince people on immunisation of their children.

“We have reduced the number of people who defied vaccination from 7,000 in 2016 to about 2,500 in 2017 in Peshawar so far. The union council level polio eradication committees meet people and remove their misconceptions about vaccination,” deputy commissioner Saqib Aslam Raza told Dawn.

He said that there were educated people among the refusing parents who didn’t allow vaccination of their children. He said that they were approached and convinced.

Mr Raza said that the field workers identified the defiant parents to the district control room for polio which assigned the relevant committee to see the parents and this strategy had paid off. Going after refusal cases is a regular assignment of the workers, he said.

Peshawar DC says refusing parents are now being convinced by local committees

The deputy commissioner said that Peshawar, dubbed as one of the three major reservoirs of poliovirus in the country, was facing migration of children from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Afghanistan and other districts of the province. He said that the relevant authorities were focusing on quality vaccination.

The environmental sewerage water sample has turned out to be negative in March and efforts are on to sustain the progress, he said. “Our people visit bus stands and other public places to give two drops of oral polio vaccine to children accompanying mothers. Most children are administered OPV in door-to-door campaigns,” he said.

Mr Raza said that the committees also recorded statements of the families for refusing vaccines wherein people put forward different arguments, including medical reasons, for not accepting OPV.

He said that covering missed children were also a priority for the vaccinators who worked under full protection of police.

The deputy commissioner said that Peshawar was still at risk though it recorded last case in Feb 2016, but threats of virus existed due to multiple factors. “We have vaccinated 800,000 target children in Peshawar, but a fraction of unvaccinated ones pose threats to the polio eradication programme in the country,” he said.

He said that a negligible percentage of the target children stayed out of the vaccination either due to inaccessibility by health workers or because of their absence when workers visited their homes. He said that all unvaccinated children were reached by teams with the community’s support.

Mr Raza said that the administration gave up the policy of arresting parents defying polio vaccination after the health department argued that it had been creating risks to health workers in areas where such parents were arrested.

Sources said that over 1,000 parents were arrested by police in the province last year and freed when they agreed on vaccination of their children in police stations.

They were detained briefly under the Maintenance of Public Order as there was no law making immunisation mandatory for children.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2017