PESHAWAR: Unvaccinated children are hindering progress of the government’s fight against poliomyelitis in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, insist health officials.

They told Dawn that in the last door-to-door anti-polio campaign from Oct 28 to Nov 3, the vaccinators missed only 1.5 per cent of the targeted children in the province due to parental refusal or the children’s unavailability at home.

The officials said of the total of 6.38 million targeted children in 30 districts, 78,355 missed polio vaccines due to their absence from home during the anti-polio teams’ visit, while 17,479 didn’t receive vaccine due to refusal or reluctance of their parents.

They said that the numbers were a cause of concern as the polio eradication programme was meant to inoculate all eligible population to eliminate the vaccine-preventable childhood ailment.

Officials say 1.5pc of targeted children missed inoculation in last campaign

The officials said Peshawar, the provincial capital, was home to most of the people showing hesitancy against polio vaccination in the province as 23,998 children stayed unvaccinated.

Of them, 15,764 children were unavailable, while 8,234 weren’t vaccinated due to parental refusal.

The officials said despite the deployment of most polio workers and others tasked with monitoring the campaign, Peshawar had been the hotspot of poliovirus, so the situation warranted immediate attention of authorities.

They said the province had recorded 10 of the 48 countrywide polio cases this year.

The officials said in most districts, the children were at risk of polio due to the presence of the virus in sewage water.

They said Dera Ismail Khan, the native district of Chief Minister Ali Amin Khan Gandapur and Governor Faisal Karim Khan Kundi, led the incidence tally with three cases, followed by two cases each from Mohmand and Kohat districts and one each from Mohmand, Nowshera and Tank districts.

The officials said chief secretary Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry, as the head of the provincial task force on polio, has been instructing the district administration and district health management in every meeting to ensure that all children get anti-polio drops in every campaign, and issued warnings of action over dereliction of duties.

They, however, said only a fraction of the targeted children missed vaccination either due to parental refusal or absence of children from home during vaccination drives, so “all the hard work by field workers goes to waste.”

The officials said that had been happening for the last two decades.

“Our workers reach more than 98 per cent of the targeted children, so only a small number of children remain without vaccination but they jeopardise the success of the entire exercise,” an official told Dawn.

He said poliomyelitis had been eradicated from the entire world, except Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan, with the help of vaccines, but vaccination refusals in the country threatened the health of their children.

The official said polio teams didn’t have an easy job as two police officers were killed in the October vaccination campaign, which took the death toll from such attacks since 2012 to more than 110.

He added that during that period, more than 300 people, including health workers and police officers guarding polio teams, had suffered injuries in attacks.

The officials said initially, the people defied vaccination for religious reasons or over rumours of a plot of the West to sterilise Muslims, but now people linked the children’s immunisation to the construction of roads, supply of water and electricity.

They said the EPI was a government programme, so it was the responsibility of official machinery to ensure that all children are immunised and if that was done, the virus could be eliminated in a few campaigns.

The officials said after polio eradication, the government could allocate the funds previously used for it to prevent and control other childhood diseases.

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2024