The fight against polio

After facing embarrassment earlier this year due to its poor efforts in eradicating polio, the government’s emergency efforts on fighting polio are starting to bear fruit. On World Polio Day over this past weekend, the Ministry of National Health announced that the number of polio cases reported this year had dropped by about 62 percent. Despite the good news, the fight against polio is far from over. Fifteen new cases of polio were still recorded over the last year as polio teams remained under threat in a number of areas. But the weekend’s optimism would have been tempered by the news on Tuesday that another law-enforcement official guarding a polio vaccination team was killed after twin blasts in Peshawar targeted the team. The death toll could obviously have been much worse. Threats such as these have meant that the number of children missed by polio vaccination is still around one percent, although it is down from last year’s 1.5 percent. Much of the new coverage is due to efforts to rid previous ‘no-go’ zones from militant groups.

The attack on the polio team in Peshawar shows that there is still a serious security threat to efforts to eradicate the disease. Seventy-one members of polio teams have been killed since 2012. The security situation in the country has not improved enough for an all-out effort against polio to succeed. Moreover, conspiracy theories about polio workers being foreign agents are still widespread and have not been countered. This is part of the larger problem of a failure to develop a national narrative against terrorism. Our leaders remain ready to use any issue possible to deflect attention from the failures of strategy and commitment. The fact that Pakistan joins Nigeria and Afghanistan as the only three countries where polio is endemic should be a matter of severe embarrassment. It also represents our failure to secure the future of our children from debilitating illnesses. The fight against polio requires much greater resolve. Right now, it is the efforts of the brave men and women who walk from house to house to administer polio drops despite threats and social stigma that must be appreciated. There may have been statistically lower cases of polio this year but this is no indication that this pattern will be followed next year. Polio can only be eradicated when Pakistan wins the war against terrorism. It is important for us to win both wars for the fate of our children.