PESHAWAR, Jan 15: Uncontrolled movement of Afghan refugees is hampering the government’s efforts to eradicate polio from the province, officials told Dawn. “Five polio cases were reported in the NWFP and Fata last year. Three of the affected people happened to be Afghan refugees,” said an official associated with the WHO’s Polio Eradication Initiative (PEI) in NWFP.
WHO, which launched the PEI in the NWFP and Fata in 1994 to provide technical and financial support to the health department at the provincial and district levels, has been facing an uphill task of checking the disease.
“We have been successful in bringing down the number of cases during the past five years, but the virus still exists which is a matter of grave concern for us,” said the official. The WHO/PEI in collaboration with Unicef carried out seven National Immunisation Days every year on which an amount of Rs900million was spent.
According to the WHO official, Peshawar city had reported two cases this year with one of them being an Afghan refugee. He said one refugee child, who was diagnosed positive for polio in the Bajuar Agency, was a close relative of the Peshawar-based polio-affected child.
Both the families frequently visited each others’ houses in Peshawar and the Bajuar Agency. Likewise, another Afghan refugee child was confirmed to be infected by polio virus in the Tank district last year.
“We recorded eight polio cases in 2004, including three Afghan children. There were 28 cases reported in 2003 and eight of them were Afghan children, while nine Afghan children were diagnosed positive for the diseases out of the total 33 cases detected in 2002,” said the official.
“We are carrying out regular mop-up rounds in areas inhabited by Afghan refugees and routes frequented by them, but their free movement across the border is hindering our efforts to eradicate the disease.”
Vaccinators had been stationed at all crossing points to Afghanistan, but still it was impossible to vaccinate all children crossing them, official conceded.
A year ago, the WHO, Unicef and representatives of 10 other donor agencies in Peshawar decided to establish a regional front comprising Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan to check the cross-border transmission of the disease, but no tangible steps were taken in this regard.
An assistant director of the health department said that in every NID, the health department vaccinated about 5.5million children, including 500,000 Afghan children. He said that Afghan families frequently visited their country and were not available during the NIDs in their homes located in the NWFP and Fata.
“These children are often not vaccinated in Afghanistan and in the process they miss anti-polio drops,” he said, adding that on their return to Pakistan, parents do not consider it important to get their children vaccinated.
Furthermore, most of the vaccinators have been complaining that they faced resistance from refugee families when they visit them during the immunisation campaign, he said.
The official said under the expanded programme on immunisation children were inoculated against seven ailments at the fixed health centres but refugees were reluctant to immunise children.”
Official said that the NWFP reported 136 polio cases in 1999, of which about 30 were Afghan refugees.