PESHAWAR: The authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are struggling to carry out the first major anti-polio vaccination campaign after April 26 that was suspended halfway after the alleged vaccine’s reaction to thousands of children, mostly in Peshawar.

The province has conducted several case-response vaccination drives since the occurrence of Peshawar’s incident in which more than 25,000 children checked into the city’s hospitals unnecessarily due to reaction, which later proved a drama staged by the owner of a private school.

Since then, the province has been in the global spotlight as it has recorded 64 polio cases of the countrywide 86 this year. Officials said that most of the children contracted the virus owing to parents’ refusal on one pretext or another.

On Monday, the Emergency Operations Centre launched four-day campaign in 11 districts to increase uptake of the oral polio vaccine and strengthen children’s immunity in the areas prone to the infection.

Four-day special campaign launched in 11 districts of the province

Dr Mohammad Salim, the director of expanded programme on immunisation, said that they would persuade the hesitant parents after end of the drive to ensure that all children under five years were vaccinated. “Besides refusals, we would also be covering missed children,” he added.

He said that on the first day of the effort in Torghar, Upper and Lower Kohistan, Kolai Palas, Shangla, Battagram, Abbottabad, Mansehra, Haripur, Charsadda and Mohmand districts, the response was satisfactory. The drive is meant to enhance resistance of the children living in the areas where virus is in circulation.

Dr Salim said that a total 1.19 million children would be inoculated to stop transmission of the virus and put brakes on the outbreak.

The World Health Organisation says that polio cases that derive from vaccines generally emerge after circulating in under-immunised communities for at least 12 months, but the type 2 virus was removed from oral vaccines in 2016, so it is not clear how the new vaccine derived cases have occurred.

On November 20, a special campaign has been planned in 21 union councils of Charsadda and Mohmand districts against the vaccine derived poliovirus type 2 (VDPV2), which was detected in nine children in August. Four of them belong to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The world health agency says that it is important to note that Pakistan is also affected by wild poliovirus type 1, which is the comparatively more virulent strain and is more geographically widespread and therefore represents the greatest risk to the children of Pakistan due to which the priority is to continue intensifying efforts to eradicate wild poliovirus type 1 as urgently as possible.

The coordinator of National EOC, Dr Rana Mohammad Safdar, told Dawn that immediately after detection, more than 180,000 children had been administered injectable polio vaccine to quickly boost their immunity.

He said that the children, who were found to have the vaccine derived VDPV2 virus from August to October, belonged to seven areas with weak routine immunisation coverage.

Pakistan Paediatrics Association said the new P2 cases were a fresh blow to the country’s polio eradication efforts amid the faltering immunisation programme due to which Pakistan’s cases rose eightfold compared to 2018.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, syndicate of WHO, Unicef, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention USA, are struggling to wipe out the virus from the last three endemic countries -- Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria -- and safeguard the children in the countries long-declared polio-free.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2019