PESHAWAR: Opposition of parents to oral polio vaccines has been haunting children in Bannu, a southern district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where about 10,000 children remained unvaccinated during the last three-day anti-polio campaign carried out on March 24, says an official document.
Bannu has recorded five polio cases in 2014 mainly owing to refusal of parents to immunise their children and its proximity with North Waziristan Agency, which is facing polio outbreak because of ban imposed on vaccination by Taliban.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has registered a total of nine polio cases this year including four from Peshawar, is the second polio-burden province after Federally Administered Tribal Areas which recorded 45 polio cases of the total 58 detected nationwide.
Bannu is billed as the significant area with regard to polio eradication efforts. The Unicef had also deployed 28 communication officers to cope with the increasing number of refusal cases there. They have started working from March 1, 2014.
About 35,000 children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have remained unvaccinated and thwarted government’s efforts to do away with the vaccine-preventable childhood ailment, despite immunisation of more than five million children below the age of five.
Health authorities reported 4,501 refusal cases in January, 6130 in February and 9823 in March this year during anti-polio campaigns in Bannu as scores of unvaccinated children migrated from nearby North Waziristan Agency owing to lawlessness there transmitted the virus to the local children.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has availed the services of 515 Unicef-funded polio communication officers, who are supposed to reduce refusals in collaboration with government. However, these officers, recruited by Communications Networking (ComNet) on the behalf of Unicef, are not only facing rise in refusals but the local health authorities say that Bannu has emerged as major threat to anti-polio efforts.
Bannu is also the only district where number of missed children owing to their non-availability is manifold more than the children missed owing to refusal by their families to vaccinate them.
The vaccinators say they missed only 696 children in January, 561 in February and 556 in March and the responsibility lies with the Unicef to persuade parents to vaccinate their children.
They argue that they don’t have coordination with the communication officers to deal with the problem of refusals. In the past, the government and district administrations have lodged complaints against these officers for not taking interest in the vaccination campaigns.The officers were initially recruited in central districts of Peshawar, Mardan, Nowshera, Charsadda and Swabi where refusals have gone up. Since the deployment of these officers, there has been no improvement with regard to refusals, according to the document.
The UNICEF was recruiting more staff to work in Bannu district due to rapid rise in refusals there, it said.
“We have started work in Bannu only two months ago but we will work in collaboration with the health department to cope with the problem,” an officer, who didn’t want to be named, told Dawn.
According to him, the ComNet staff worked in 10 districts of the province to create demand for OPV and resolve the perennial problem of refusals.