PESHAWAR: Lack of sufficient staff and proper coordination between the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department and administrations of southern districts are hampering immunisation of the displaced children arriving from North Waziristan Agency. Officials said that all children coming from North Waziristan Agency should be vaccinated on their arrival by deploying sufficient staff in Bannu and other districts.

“We need to repeatedly vaccinate the children who have not been vaccinated since June 2012. Their immunisation is of utmost importance because there is a severe outbreak of polio in North Waziristan,” a vaccinator said.

North Waziristan has recorded 50 of the 83 polio cases in the country so far. An estimated 160,000 children have been unvaccinated since Taliban banned immunisation 20 months ago. These children posed serious threats to the children in host communities in different cities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The health department in Bannu would earlier give oral polio vaccine (OPV) to children under 10 years, but three days ago it had launched general vaccination of people regardless of age on the recommendations of the World Health Organisation.

Unvaccinated kids from North Waziristan pose serious threat to host communities

The officials said that the health department hadn’t yet appointed a full-time deputy director of Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) after suspension of the former a week ago, which was also one of the factors hampering the vaccination programme of displaced people in the southern belt. “It is the best opportunity to immunise the people here because they are going registration points and fixed routes,” they said.

Shortage of staff with the health department in southern districts – especially Bannu which had received a bulk of the uprooted people – is another problem. There is no additional staff with the district health officers in these districts and the existing employees have been giving OPV to the people. The DHOs in southern districts have deployed most of the health workers in medical camps set up for IDPs, making it humanely impossible to deploy vaccinators for longer periods at the registration points.

“We want to vaccinate the displaced persons before their entry into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” the officials said.

The upcoming Ramazan and hot weather could make matters worse for the health department which will not be able to reach all the people in southern districts and elsewhere.

Officials in Bannu said that the health department should coordinate with the Pakistan Army to ensure that all the displaced people were administered vaccines on their way from Waziristan.

They also want the directorate of health, Fata, to coordinate with the army and KP health department to ensure vaccination of all displaced people to prevent transmission of poliovirus to population in the province.

Health officials in some areas said that there was a complete coordination between them and the Pakistan Army to ensure immunisation of children. They said that the army had informed the health department of new families arriving in Lakki Marwat, who were immediately vaccinated.

“We should immunise the people frequently because poliovirus is in full circulation in the areas from where they have arrived,” said a health worker.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2014