Polio Crisis in Pakistan

Polio crisis in Pakistan has reached to unexpected numbers. Even as domestic vaccination drives and extensive international aid have put huge numbers of anti-polio staff in the field. Militant groups working in Pakistan have taken it as an opportunity to strike at symbols of authority. In this regard health workers were gunned down, bringing them to  death.

Same way in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, attackers opened fire on the workers’ vehicle after trying to know if they were involved in the anti-polio campaign. Television footage showed emergency workers carrying three other wounded workers from a van that contained abandoned slippers and blood-smeared iceboxes with polio vaccines.

Those attackers easily escaped, and there was no claim of responsibility. Polio vaccinations are “dangerous to health and against Islam,” a spokesman for one the terrorist group, said after the attack, echoing claims that Western countries are using immunization to sterilize Muslim children.

But the power of such conspiracy theories has been diminished by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from Gulf countries and Islamic organizations toward the immunization campaign. Many persons believe the militants simply see the attacks as another way to challenge authority. “It’s not just polio they want to disrupt all government activities instead.

War and politics has also accelerated the surge in polio infections during previous years. A sweeping military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups in the North Waziristan tribal district caused at least a million civilians to flee into neighboring areas and across the border into Afghanistan. But few of the children in that outpouring of refugees had been immunized for polio, because vaccinators had been unable to reach the area, which for many years had been the main target of American drone strikes. “It wasn’t even an underimmunized area; it was nonimmunized,” said the World Health Organization’s polio coordinator in Pakistan.

As fleeing families reached refugee camps and then often moved beyond, polio infection rates soared, and the virus spread to new areas, including the country’s largest city, Karachi. The number of districts infected by polio increased. Almost three quarters of the new cases came from the tribal districts of North Waziristan, South Waziristan and Khyber.

Crises surrounding in Pakistan’s polio emergency have had another effect: acute embarrassment among many Pakistanis who, after years of seeking to shake off Western perceptions of their country as an incubator of global terrorism, now also find it painted as a global disease hub. Regulations introduced this year require air travelers from Pakistan of all ages to produce a certificate proving that they have been vaccinated for polio. One newspaper called the epidemic Pakistan’s “badge of shame.”

The other two countries where polio is endemic have recorded more modest infection rates. So far this year, Afghanistan has registered some new cases, many of which are a result of refugees fleeing Pakistan.  In Nigeria, which is battling the Boko Haram insurgency and, more recently, a small outbreak of Ebola, has had just six cases.

Pakistani officials believe that Pakistan has exported the polio virus to China, Egypt and Syria in some cases, but experts believe, via militant families traveling to the battlefields of the Middle East.

In a bid to address the problem, Mr. Sharif constituted an emergency response committee and administered polio drops to children at a ceremony in Islamabad. Immunization was an issue of “utmost importance” and the right of every Pakistani child, he said.

Prime Minister of Pakistan hoped that the health authorities and international donors could use the coming six months, considered to be the low season for polio transmission, to reverse the tide of infections. Experts say that, even if militant violence continues, immunization is still possible provided there are adequate security precautions. Since the first death of a polio worker two years ago, health workers have delivered 450 million doses of vaccine.

Since then health officials have recorded another nine polio cases in the province Baluchistan that is more than Somalia. It caused health experts to start a targeted vaccination drive in 11 districts of Baluchistan , including the effort in Quetta, where the health workers were killed.