Pakistan’s polio crisis sparks global concerns
Faced with an international travel ban, the Government of Pakistan's renewed efforts to fight polio could not have come a day sooner. Earlier this month, Pakistan, alongside war-ravaged Syria and poverty-stricken Cameroon, was put on a blacklist of sorts for exporting the wild poliovirus. According to the World Health Organisation, infected adult travellers from these three countries have already spread the disease to seven other states across the globe from Afghanistan to Israel to Ethiopia. This, in turn, has raised fears that the disease, which had been all but eradicated from the face of the earth with even international transmissions having nearly ceased between January 2012 and April 2013, may stage a comeback. The consequent global scare has thankfully now trained the spotlight firmly on Pakistan which reported 59 of the 68 polio cases worldwide. The World Health Organisation has not only made it compulsory for all foreign travellers from Pakistan to be inoculated but also compelled the Pakistani Government to declare polio a national health emergency. A vast majority of Pakistan's polio victims are in that country's northwestern and tribal regions, where militancy is rife. The Taliban spearhead a violent anti-vaccine campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, on the ground that inoculation is either irreligious or a Zionist conspiracy to make the Muslim world impotent. For good measure, suspicions of Western espionage are also added to the mix. In fact, polio vaccination is banned in North and South Waziristan. The situation is hardly any better outside the tribal areas in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province where polio worker have recently resumed work under military protection.
In fact, Pakistan’s polio problem is fast spreading across the country, with a disturbingly high number of cases being reported from the settled areas as well. Apart from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's provincial capital of Peshawar, polio has also reared its ugly head in Karachi (possibly because the city serves as an important transit point), and even in lahore, capital of the relatively prosperous and peaceful Punjab Province. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has responded to this crisis by restricting the travel of Fata residents to the rest of the country. While this is a necessary short term measure, it cannot replace a comprehensive, nation-wide polio vaccination campaign — and for this, the Government has to take full responsibility. let there be no doubt that apart from the Taliban's mindless opposition to vaccination, the Pakistani state's failure to implement a successful polio campaign is also part of the problem. For instance, there have been reports of expired vaccines being administered to children. Also, given that power outages are a frequent occurrence in Pakistan, storage of vaccines has been a problem. In fact, Pakistan's decrepit healthcare sector inspires so little confidence in the public that even the country's educated elite sometime refuse to be inoculated.