Pakistan Unable To Eradicate Polio Even In 2018
Pakistan Unable To Eradicate Polio Even In 2018: Pakistan has not been successful even in 2018 to achieve the target of a polio-free country despite conducting a full-fledged anti-polio campaign for the last five months.
20 cases were reported in 2016, 8 cases in 2017 and till date in 2018 3 cases have been reported. All the 3 cases have emerged from Dukki district of Balochistan.
In April, the government launched a nationwide polio vaccination drive to reach 38.7 million children to eradicate the paralyzing and potentially deadly virus. Reported cases have steadily declined since 2014 when 306 were reported.
Efforts to eradicate the disease have been undermined by opposition from the Taliban and other militants, who term immunization a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or provide cover for Western spies.
In January, gunmen killed a vaccination team, comprising a mother and her daughter, working in Balochistan. Three years earlier, 15 people were killed in a bombing by the Pakistani Taliban outside a polio vaccination centre in Balochistan.
After Afghanistan, Pakistan is the second country in the world that has failed to eliminate polio virus, despite the fact that the country stands far ahead of Afghanistan in terms of development and available resources. Hence, it is not hard to ascertain that failure certainly lies in the inefficient running of campaigns and polio drives that have still possibly not covered the areas where cases have been reported from.
With the failure to eradicate polio, Pakistan has been placed with Afghanistan among the only two countries of the world still grappling with a virus the world has tackled successfully years ago.
National Emergency Operation Center Coordinator Dr. Rana Mohammad Safdar spoke on the current polio epidemiology and the plans to interrupt the virus.
“Maintaining highest quality supplementary immunization activity campaigns in alignment with Afghanistan with focus on hotspots will do the job along with convergence of efforts for strengthening routine immunization, water and sanitation as well as nutrition especially in areas of remaining polio concerns,” he said.
The health authorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan have stopped leveling allegations against each other, it is a fact that due to security issues polio campaigns cannot be held in many parts of Afghanistan. Even if Pakistan eradicates the virus it cannot be declared a polio-free country unless the virus is eradicated in Afghanistan too.
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