After years of disappointment, there is finally some hope for polio eradication in Pakistan. According to a senior UNICEF official, Pakistan’s polio programme is back on track. With this announcement, there is renewed hope that the crippling disease will be eradicated in the country by the end of 2023.
The poliovirus primarily affects children under the age of five, infecting their nervous systems and causing paralysis, which can be fatal in some cases. Once infected, the child is nearly incurable, and vaccination is only effective prior to the virus’s attack. As the country’s teeming population adds millions of newborn babies to its tally, protecting its children from this disease is critical.
After years of disappointment, there is finally some hope for polio eradication in Pakistan. According to a senior UNICEF official, Pakistan’s polio programme is back on track. With this announcement, there is renewed hope that the crippling disease will be eradicated in the country by the end of 2023.
The poliovirus primarily affects children under the age of five, infecting their nervous systems and causing paralysis, which can be fatal in some cases. Once infected, the child is nearly incurable, and vaccination is only effective prior to the virus’s attack. As the country’s teeming population adds millions of newborn babies to its tally, protecting its children from this disease is critical.
As a result, over 300,000 health workers travel across the country each year to administer vaccine doses, but their safety has remained a major concern. This is a major challenge that can only be met by the government and state institutions. Attacks on polio teams and their guards have hampered efforts to completely eradicate the virus. Although some parts of Pakistan are particularly vulnerable to such attacks, the bravery of the polio teams and their guards is admirable.
Although the national immunisation programme has been running successfully for many years, it still falls short of achieving a polio-free Pakistan. This year’s efforts must be even more ambitious because the country has experienced unprecedented droughts and floods, displacing millions of people across Pakistan’s provinces. Natural disasters are exacerbated by acts of violence, putting millions of children at risk of missing vaccines. It is even more difficult to reach every child in the country in the absence of basic health facilities that have been destroyed.
The number of disaster-affected districts is large, as is the number of vulnerable children for whom the health sector has failed to provide immunisation. One hopes that the UNICEF prediction is correct, but complacency will not get us there.
However, according to WHO, now is the time to “pull out all the stops to intensify our surveillance to actively search for the virus.” This can be accomplished by attacking the remaining local transmission chains, as suggested by the WHO, or by actively searching for what Unicef claims is a large number of missing children who were not covered by immunisation drives. Polio eradication remains elusive, but recent experience has shown that it is not impossible to achieve. Polio authorities, health workers, and the general public should band together for one last push to eliminate the threat once and for all.
