Parental opposition defeating anti-polio efforts in Pakistan

Islamabad: A lot of Pakistani parents' reluctance to administer oral polio vaccine (OPV) to their children is plaguing the anti-polio endeavour in the country, a media report here said Monday citing official statistics.

According to official data, 149 of the total 166 polio-affected children recorded this year so far are of those who have not received polio drops and it is because of parents' refusal to get OPV administered to their children, Dawn news reported Monday.

Pakistan has so far recorded 166 countrywide cases this year against 93 in 2013, mainly due to parents' misconceptions held by families, officials said.

A total of 119 cases have been registered so far in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) where issues of security and Taliban's ban on immunisation in North and South Waziristan agencies and inaccessibility of health workers to the target children remain the main areas of concerns.

Though authorities say they are not able to record refusals in FATA, the trend in rest of the country about refusals is alarming, Indications are that refusals will continue to haunt Pakistan's anti-polio drive in future.

Even outside FATA, which has often been blamed for blocking polio vaccination efforts, of the remaining 47 cases, 31 affected children were not administered OPV and regarded as cases of chronic refusals, they said.

Despite efforts, the vaccination refusal cases have been a common feature as of the total 28 cases detected this year in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the parents of 20 polio-affected children refused polio vaccination, they said.

The officials said that of the nine cases in Peshawar six had not received OPV due to defiance by their parents. In Bannu district, 11 of 12 polio-affected children remained unimmunised due to refusal by their parents.

According to the official records, 70 percent of the children testing positive this year outside FATA had not been vaccinated due to parents' refusal.

Karachi has reported 13 cases in 2014 and eight of the children were crippled by poliomyelitis only because of their parents' rejection of vaccination. The problem of refusals has become a challenge for the health authorities and UN agencies engaged in the polio eradication campaign, the media report added.