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PESHAWAR: As Khyber Pakhtunkhwa begins vaccinating about 6.4 million children under five against polio on November 30, new cases of polio continue to emerge.
Chief Secretary Dr. Kazim Niaz on Friday inaugurated the vaccination campaign at the police services hospital, where he urged parents to ignore anti-vaccine propaganda and save their children from disabilities.
A WHO report said KP had recorded five circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) cases in 2019 and 42 in 2020. Last year, three districts were infected versus 11 today. KP represented 42 of the 81 registered cases nationwide.
As for wild polio cases, the province has made progress as it has reported only 22 cases so far this year, up from 66 this time last year.
However, experts say still sample collection has declined due to polio staff engagement in COVID-19 activities. The WHO-run polio surveillance system sends stool samples from children with the slightest doubt of paralysis for laboratory analysis, but due to Covid for half the year the health facilities were non-functional or semi-functional focusing only on Covid- 19. Cases of paralysis were not brought into the facilities which caused a decline in performance.
This resulted in fewer cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) reported this year than the previous year. Last year, out of 15,216 AFP cases, 93 were positive, and this year about 9,473 AFP cases have confirmed polio in 81 so far, meaning the positivity ratio is higher than last year.
The chief secretary inaugurates the vaccination campaign
Experts point out that Pakistan has fared poorly compared to Afghanistan, where only 53 cases have been reported so far. They said the history of polio eradication has remained a never-ending story of promise, reassurance and the status quo.
At a recent provincial task force meeting, the chief secretary was told that the polio program was on a “winning trajectory” since July 2020, despite the fact that only a small-scale campaign has been conducted since then. Experts in the country are amazed by this logic of how cases could be reduced when there is no large-scale campaign.
The Independent Monitoring Board report in July 2020 warned against the celebration of case reduction and called Pakistan’s polio program “Too self-indulgent.”
Experts said the UN-led polio program model proved too expensive and ineffective, and they wanted the government to lead the way in eradicating the crippling disease.
Dr Rana Mohammad Safdar, National Operation Center (NOC) Coordinator for Polio Eradication, told Dawn she suffered a 19-month Covid drop in surveillance, but the detection was not seriously compromised as everyone districts remained above global standards of 2 / 100,000 and national standards of 6 / 100,000 non-polio AFP rates.
“We opted for extensive contact sampling in cases with the slightest doubt about the suitability of the stool. The epidemiological decline in cases is encouraging, but without forgetting that when the ultimate goal is zero, even one is too much, “he said.
Transmission is widespread in the Pak-Afghan bloc, but wild polio cases in Afghanistan have increased from 29 in 2019 to 54 so far, while Pakistan has reported 81 so far versus 147 in 2019.
Dr. Safdar said in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic they took a bold step to restart routine immunization in May and polio campaigns in July with precautions.
Published on Dawn, November 28, 2020
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