PESHAWAR, March 13: Health experts have urged speeding up of efforts to eliminate poliomyelitis as quickly as possible so that huge funds being spent on polio immunisation efforts can be diverted to tackling other child health problems. “We have aggressively been working towards eradication of the poliomyelitis because it is eating up all the resources meant for child health,” said Dr Jan Baz Afridi, deputy director of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation, while talking to this correspondent.

Number of refusal cases has declined to only 2,100 compared to 21,000 recorded earlier this year, he said. “During the three-day anti-polio campaign from March 7 to 9, 4.3 million children below the age of five years had been administered oral polio vaccine (OPV). In some snow-bound areas, final reports were still awaited,” he said, adding, vaccinators were trying constantly to cover the missed children in the campaign.

In Chitral, the campaign was not conducted due to snow. New approaches were being adopted to reach to the children and wipe out the disease this year, he said. The involvement of the lady health workers (LHWs), he said had given positive results as they had vaccinated 1.8 million children in the campaign while 57,310 children were vaccinated by transit teams.

“We spend huge amounts on polio campaigns and need to speed up our efforts to eliminate the disease within possible time so that money being consumed by such programmes could be diverted to control other diseases afflicting the children,” said an official of the Unicef. He said the donor organisations were extremely concerned over the rise in the polio cases in the Federally Administered Tribal Area and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and wanted the ailment to be eliminated through vaccination. The WHO has spent Rs20 million on operations in each of the nine NIDs (National Immunisation Day).

Donors and the health department have been spending huge amounts on provision of stationary, finger markers, mosque flayers, school flayers and procurement of vaccines. More than Rs5 million were only allocated for orientation and planning meetings before each of the NIDs while more than Rs2.1 million were paid to the vaccination trams in every campaign. There are other expenditures used for social mobilisation and monitoring.

“The Fata (9) and KP (1) have together recorded 10 polio cases of the total 13 in the country this year,” said Dr Jan Baz of EPI. He said the role of ulema was also useful in the anti-polio efforts because they had been successfully addressing the refusal cases. “Our partnership with National Research and Development Foundation (NRDF) has been making a difference as we are reaching to the children whose parents were previously unwilling to get immunised their children against polio,” he said.

The NRDF’s coordinator Tahseenullah Khan told Dawn that people were willing to immunise their children once ‘we remove their misconception that OPV causes impotency and infertility’.

“For instance, in Nowshera a local cleric was opposed to vaccination because he regarded it as against Islam to immunise children. We sat with him and convinced him with the help of ulema. Within minutes, we were able to vaccinate over 100 children,” he said.

Religious scholars were highly sensitive people and in many harder areas of Fata and KP, they were accompanying the vaccinators. Even they delivered special sermons in mosques to convince the people on vaccination.

“Support by the government, Unicef and WHO is the moving sprit which had enlisted the support of thousands of ulema for the campaign,” said Mr Baz.