FAISALABAD, Aug 26: Medical practitioners say the polio eradication campaign is full of flaws and cannot yield positive results. They said a nine-month-old boy contracted polio at Dera Jamal in Sargodha , and the case was confirmed by a team of the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to experts, the main reason for failure of the campaign was the ill-trained, ill-equipped and ill-supervised field staff. A field worker was expected to travel extensively in extremely hot weather on a meagre daily allowance of Rs80 and was supposed to arrange a water-cooler and ice for the vaccine. How could he be expected to keep the vaccine at 4 degrees centigrade in these conditions.

Sources disclosed that the potency of vaccine was checked just by comparing its colour with colour of the label. Workers' eyesight or colour blindness is never checked for the naked eye examination.Record of the number of doses given to a child is not kept either.

A senior officer of the department told this reporter that the polio-affected child of Dera Jamal must have taken the drops five times, as five national immunization days (NIDs) had been observed since his birth, but he still did not get immunized against the disease.

Either the vaccine was not given to the child at all or was given in inadequate doses, which may also not have been spaced properly. Or the vaccine may have been substandard. "If any of the reasons is true, one can only wonder how many children may have been affected."

He urged the government to adopt scientifically sound measures and checkup facilities for eradication of polio. The money being spent on NIDs should be used to establish regular immunization centres, he said.