PESHAWAR, Jan 4: The provincial health department will tomorrow (Friday) apprise the government and international donors of the challenges facing immunisation programme in the province, especially frequent migration of children, poor security of vaccinators and vaccination refusal by parents, and seek their help and cooperation in aptly attending to them.
Health department bosses are to interact with representatives of the relevant provincial government departments, World Health Organisation, United Nations' Children Fund and parliamentarians during a meeting to be chaired by provincial Governor Masood Kausar.
The relevant officials told Dawn on Wednesday that health department bosses would explain their position to participants on failure to meet the polio eradication targets set by the federal government for last year and give suggestions for strengthening the routine immunisation in 2012 to contain the crippling disease.
Officials said immunisation in the province had improved in 2011 but the issues related to other government agencies negatively impacted on the department's performance.
They said of the 21 cases reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year, seven contracted polio in Karachi and six in the adjoining Federally Administered Tribal Areas according to their genetic sampling, while four couldn't be vaccinated as their parents turned away polio teams and the rest suffered from the crippling disease despite immunisation for being a victim of compromised immunity.
“We will seek the government's commitment besides logistic and technical support by UN agencies and other partner organisations to address poor vaccination,” said an official.
He said poor security stopped vaccinators from accessing certain parts of Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Shangla, Kohistan, Torghar, Dera Ismail Khan, Shabqadar, Charsadda, FR Peshawar and Kohat. He said independent monitoring of vaccination campaign was not possible in these areas.
Officials said of the targeted five million children, only 20,000 (0.4 per cent) weren't vaccinated on refusal of their parents, who were considered vaccination either un-Islamic or a US ploy to sterilise children to reduce Muslim population in the world.
“We will ask for more support of district administrations at union council level, especially in the areas declared high-risk, to ensure that children don't miss administration of anti-polio drops,” the official said.
He said some districts like Upper Dir, Kohistan, Shangla, Tank and Torghar were without the desired number of health staff for immunisation. He said doctors and paramedics were reluctant to serve in the health facilities of these underdeveloped areas leaving sanctioned posts vacant despite repeated placement of advertisements in newspapers.
Officials also said another challenge for the health department was to improve routine immunisation from the current 62 per cent to 80 per cent in 2012.
