KARACHI: Taliban militants have long been the scourge of Pakistan’s polio vaccination campaign, attacking aid workers and the police who protect them as they distribute doses to children.
But experts say there is another reason for the sharp spike in cases of the crippling disease in Pakistan this year — government mismanagement.
“Pakistan’s polio programme is a disaster. It continues to flounder hopelessly, as its virus flourishes,” the Independent Monitoring Board, which advises agencies fighting polio, will say in a report to be released this week.
The prime minister’s polio cell was disbanded during 2013 elections, the new government delayed reconstituting it, and in recent months the prime minister has been consumed with protests in the capital that have only just ended.
“It’s frustrating. Eradicating polio is not rocket science,” said Elias Durry, head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) polio campaign in Pakistan.
“If we could have three to five months to have really good campaigns, then we could get rid of this disease,” he said. “We have been doing half-baked campaigns in high risk areas.”
Polio was meant be a thing of the past. A global campaign came tantalisingly close to wiping out the disease altogether.
Now polio, which can kill or paralyse a child in hours, is endemic only in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. So far this year, Pakistan has had 217 polio cases, a 14-year high accounting for 85 percent of instances around the world.
The disease spreads easily from person to person, and Pakistan has already exported the virus to Syria, China, Israel and Egypt. Experts say complacency is not an option and the government has called the situation an “emergency”.
Yet as the latest vaccination campaign kicked off this week in the broiling, garbage-strewn alleys of Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi, vaccination workers said they had not received stipends from the provincial government for months.
Some have dropped out of the campaign in Karachi, a teeming city of 18 million people where the disease is entrenched.
As teams prepared to venture out on vaccination missions into some of Karachi’s most dangerous streets, police deployed to protect them showed up late.
Vaccinators must wait, meaning they miss children. Sometimes only a third of children in an area are vaccinated, the WHO said, and low coverage fuels new outbreaks.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took six months to appoint an official responsible for polio, and the government approved a funding plan only last month.
That meant provinces did not pay workers their stipends of $2.50 a day on time, said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, a polio adviser to Sindh province in the south where Karachi is located.
“We had a loss of about nine to 10 months, which is a very big setback,” Ali said.
Ayesha Farooq, the prime minister’s appointee on polio, admitted there were problems, but said that payment arrears were down to provincial, not central government.
Most new cases were in areas where security was poor so children had not been vaccinated, she said, and denied that Sharif was not taking the issue seriously.
“We have got to take responsibility for our weaknesses,” Farooq said. “The quality of campaigns is something we will be paying close attention to.” REUTERS
