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UAE funds help open up Pak polio programme

Refusal to be vaccinated on religious grounds was one of the reasons for the disease to resurface last year.

Dubai — The UAE’s help towards Pakistan’s polio programme has helped open up areas that were earlier inaccessible to vaccinators and made people more approachable, said the head of Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Programme.

“When we tell people that a brotherly Muslim country is funding this programme, they do not refuse the vaccination,” said Senator Ayesha Raza Farooq, the Prime Minister’s Focal Person for Polio Eradication in an interview on Thursday.

Refusals to be vaccinated on religious grounds have always been one reason why polio, a crippling disease eradicated years ago, reared its head in Pakistan in 2014 when 306 cases were reported.

But now with a renewed strategy and with the support of the Pakistan army to protect workers and weed out terrorists from northern areas, family refusal rates have decreased sharply, from 0.30 per cent to 0.11 per cent, the lowest ever in the programme’s history.

The UAE has been a major contributor in Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Programme. In the first phase last year, the UAE contributed $13 million to the programme, increasing it to $24 million for phase two that started in January and ends this month.

The funds from the UAE are used to source the vaccine (oral drops and injectible IPV) from Europe as well as pay salaries to the 200,000 health workers employed for the campaign.

Ayesha was part of a delegation led by Pakistan’s Minister for National Health Services, Saira Afzal Tarar, who met the Independent Monitoring Board or IMB (that reports to the World Health Organisation), in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. The delegation briefed IMB on the progress made by the country in stopping transmission of poliovirus. “The IMB has appreciated Pakistan’s efforts,” she added.

“We have also increased salaries of vaccinators and employed female workers from the community so that the trust and religious factors are answered,” said Ayesha.

Vaccinations banned

The Pakistani Taleban have banned vaccinations in areas under their control while many health workers or policemen guarding vaccine campaigns have been shot dead by gunmen. In June 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that all international travellers from Pakistan be administered polio drops at airports so as to prevent the proliferation of poliovirus but no travel ban was imposed. “There has been a major turnaround in the polio situation due to improved security and high level of political commitment,” said Ayesha. Pakistan has exported the virus only to Afghanistan since December 2012.  She said that there was a sharp rise in the campaign coverage and a dip in the number of reported cases.

“The five campaigns we have conducted in 2015 have achieved an overall coverage of 98 per cent against that of 94 per cent achieved in 2014,” she said.

Polio cases have also plummeted from 58 in the corresponding period last year to 22 cases this year.

Poliovirus is increasingly disappearing from environmental samples, too. Most recently, samples tested negative for the virus in reservoir areas such as Gadap and Baldia Karachi, Quetta and Killa Abdullah.

Similarly, besides negative environmental samples from Islamabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Faisalabad and Dera Ismail Khan, the indigenous poliovirus transmission in Lahore has also been halted.

“We have problems in Peshawar but we are trying to overcome them through use of technology,” she said.
        

- asmaalizain@khaleejtimes.com