Pakistan: Far from polio-free

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/

With 500,000 children yet to be vaccinated, Pakistan stands at a deplorable position on this year’s World Polio Day where it adds 85 percent of polio cases to the world. More than 200 cases have been reported since January this year alone, a fourfold increase as compared to last year. Such escalation of the disease creates many doubts about the stat’s measures and their outcome. As if the government’s inability and lack of an efficacious regimr to tackle this pandemic was not enough, there had to be a conspiratorial element to further depreciate all the efforts. Somehow, the terrorists’ narrative got it into some people’s mind that the polio vaccinations are actually meant to render us sterile and is therefore an un-Islamic act. Hence no parents should allow their children to be vaccinated. Moreover, the polio immunisation teams whose workers carry out door-to-door vaccinations should be killed as they are part of this sinister conspiracy against Muslims. Since this narrative got out, a series of attacks have been carried out targeting polio teams and killings dozens of health workers, mostly in the troubled areas of Khyber Phakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan. As a result of which the most challenging issue for the government is how to retrieve the lost public trust where people in these areas now refuse to get their children immunised. A report suggests that all of the six polio cases reported from Quetta were solely because of their parents’ refusal to get their children vaccinated.

Despite many edicts being issued by different clerics and religious scholars to unequivocally endorse the necessity of these immunisations, no adequate narrative seems to be in place and after having all these alarming facts in front of us, one wonders why the government has not adopted an effective policy on a war footing. When will it come out of its slothful mode? The country needs a strong counter-narrative to make people realise the sense of urgency and the threat it poses to us and the world otherwise the field is open for this crippling disease to take hold even more widely. Is it not shameful that in the entire world, Pakistan remains one of those three countries where polio is still being categorised as endemic? Its contagiousness poses a threat to the rest of the world that is polio-free. Surely, we do not want to isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity. It is not only for our own sake but in order to be an active member of today’s dynamic global world that we need to get rid of this affliction as soon as possible.