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Thursday March 28, 2024

Polio refusal cases on the rise in city

Karachi As the number of parents refusing to get their children vaccinated against polio are increasing in Karachi, the number of children being missed during monthly and additional vaccination drives has risen significantly, The News learnt on Monday. Thousands of children are either hidden by parents when health workers knock

By M Waqar Bhatti
November 24, 2015
Karachi
As the number of parents refusing to get their children vaccinated against polio are increasing in Karachi, the number of children being missed during monthly and additional vaccination drives has risen significantly, The News learnt on Monday.
Thousands of children are either hidden by parents when health workers knock on their door for polio vaccination, or the children are missed because the families keep moving to and from the city.
At least 16,319 children could not be vaccinated during the last special vaccination drive held last week in the eight Super High Risk union councils.
The target was to vaccinate 220,352 children in these eight union councils but the vaccinators were only able to reach 204,033 children, city’s health officials said.
The number of refusals in these Super High Risk union councils was extremely high, especially in Sohrab Goth and Gadap areas.
“The vaccinators were either turned away or they were not able to reach the children for one or the other reason,” said an official on the condition of anonymity.
The matter was discussed on Monday in a high-level meeting chaired by Karachi Commissioner Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, when he was told that a list of parents refusing vaccination for their children had been prepared and the deputy commissioners concerned were contemplating strategies to persuade people to get their kids immunised.
Speaking at the meeting, the commissioner vowed that parents will not only be compelled to get their children vaccinated but also to stay at home during vaccination drives. He said a great amount of financial and human resources were being spent to conduct special vaccination drives amid tight security.
Though the commissioner declared at the meeting, where representatives of the World Health Organization and Unicef were also present, that from now on no parent shall be allowed to refuse vaccination for his or her child while ensuring that action will also be taken against people who jeopardised the health of children of the whole country.
Two polio cases have emerged in the city one after the other since October.
The first polio case of the year in Karachi surfaced in Shafiq Colony of Gulberg town, near Sohrab Goth, when an 18-month-old girl tested positive for polio. The family, belonging to Waziristan, had hid the child when vaccinators had come to their door during the routine immunisation drives.
The second polio case emerged in another Pashtun family living in Sikandarabad area of Keamari town. However, the family said the child had been vaccinated at least nine times during routine and special vaccination drives in the area.
The town health officer’s report had stated the child to be weak and malnourished from repeated illnesses.
In lieu of this, the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) for Polio in Sindh plans to hold special “mop-up” vaccination drives in three union councils of Keamari and four union councils of Saddar Town between November 25 and 28. The campaign aspires to vaccinate around 54,517 children in these seven union councils.
According to an official of the EOC, the mop-up drive will be held in union councils 1,2 and 5 of Keamari and 4,9, 10 and 11 of Saddar Town.
However, city’s health officials expressed their dissatisfaction with the ongoing anti-polio efforts saying, that the immunisation drives were so frequent that it had irritated the parents to the extent of inciting refusals from them.
They claimed that due to too many successive campaigns, the rate of refusal by parents and hiding their children from vaccinators was on the rise, and in some cases the health workers were also found to have shown some dereliction towards their responsibilities.
“Some vaccinators complained they were being turned away by parents and asked what was the point of going to houses every other day. In some cases, parents hid their children as soon as they learnt a vaccination drive was going on in the area,” said a government official, requesting anonymity.
“Polio can be eradicated from Pakistan like smallpox but it can’t be done by forcing the vaccine onto people. All the stakeholders have to sit together again and chalk out a new strategy before the number of refusals and missed children gets too high to control.”
According to a report of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the current winter season which will last till March 2016, as the only window for Pakistan to be able to check the prevalence of polio in Pakistan. It warns that if this window of low-transmission season is missed, the next summer would wreck havoc to all the efforts which have so far been put into the eradication of polio from the country.