With the appearance of two back-to-back polio cases in April, despite investing $5 billion over the last 27 years, the ideal of a polio-free Pakistan remained elusive, according to the media. According to Geo News, issues thwarting the achievement of the milestone included widespread suspicion in some areas of society over the anti-polio campaign and a bad law and order environment.
Experts blame a deep mistrust of Oral Polio Vaccination (OPV) among Pashtun communities living on Pakistan’s Afghan border for a recent wave of insurgency and attacks on security forces in former tribal areas, as well as a failure to track missing children during polio vaccination campaigns, for the country’s relapse of polio cases.
In the impending high-transmission season of summer, they predict that more polio cases will emerge from KPK’s tribal belt, Balochistan’s Pashtun districts, and Karachi’s super high-risk union councils.
They also alleged that due to weak vaccination programmes in recent months, hundreds of children were unable to be inoculated against the devastating disease. A two-year-old baby girl was found sick with polio on April 29 in North Waziristan, while a 15-month-old child was found paralysed with the terrible poliovirus on April 22 in the same area.
Despite dozens of vaccination campaigns across the country, neither of the children had received a single drop of Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV).
Since 1994, when the campaign began with the giving of a polio dose to Aseefa Bhutto Zardari, the daughter of late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, almost $5 billion has been spent in Pakistan to eradicate polio, according to Geo News. Millions of children have received hundreds of litres of oral polio vaccination since then.
In an interview with The News, a former official with the Pakistani polio eradication initiative blamed “deep mistrust in the Pashtun” communities, particularly tribal area people, for the failure of polio eradication efforts, claiming that despite spending millions of dollars on advocacy, adamant parents refused to let their children receive OPV drops.
“Hundreds of them still see the campaigns as a conspiracy, and privately advise freshly married couples to forego OPV shots for their children,” the official, who is Pashtun, alleged.
He went on to say that Pashtuns made up over 90% of the youngsters disabled by poliovirus, and that the vast majority of them had not gotten a single drop of OPV during routine or special vaccination programmes.
