PESHAWAR, July 16: The World Health Organisation has expressed concern over likely setback its polio eradication campaign in Pakistan may face in the wake of rumours about the safety of the vaccine in three provinces.

“I am very concerned that the rumours about vaccine safety spreading to other provinces, particularly in Sindh,” said a letter sent to the federal Health Minister Naseer Khan by the WHO’s regional director Hussein A. Gezairy on July 12.

The Cairo-based WHO’s regional office for Eastern Mediterranean appreciated efforts put in by the Pakistan government in bringing down the number of polio cases from 25,000 only 10 years ago to 28 in 2005, but said that recent developments in Balochistan, the NWFP and Sindh were beginning to show serious negative trends. Balochistan, after being polio-free for a year, recorded eight cases of polio in 2005 while five had been reported so far this year, it said.

The letter said that it meant that the national programme was able to prevent approximately a quarter of million children from being handicapped in Pakistan, which was a huge achievement.

It said that it the efforts and achievements were being jeopardised and Pakistani children were threatened of being deprived of living in a polio-free country because of irrelevant issues like matters relating to paramedics in Balochistan and unfounded rumours in the NWFP about the vaccine’s safety.

The letter said that during May 2006, three polio cases were reported, which was the largest number of cases reported in any month in the province during the past three years.

Both situations, it said, are caused by lower than expected immunisation coverage rates during the supplementary immunisation drives. The WHO’s regional director urged the federal government “to address the underlying causes of these setbacks and to challenge these unfounded, unsubstantiated claims about vaccine safety.”

The WHO official reaffirmed that the oral polio vaccine used in Pakistan and procured by Unicef “meets the specifications set by the Expert Committee on Biological Standardisation (ECBS) with respect to purity and contents and does not contain any undeclared biologically active substance such as hormones”.

It said that the WHO’s prequalification process “systematically ensures that all UN-procured vaccines are safe, potent and of high purity standard”.

It said that WHO’s immunisation campaigns had reduced the number of polio cases from over 350,000 in 1988 to 1,951 cases in 2005, showing a greater than 99 per cent reduction.