Getting close to victory in polio war

IANS Hapur (UP) July 21: The intensive war against polio being fought door-to-door in most populous state finally appears to be showing results with the number of cases dramatically falling to 12 this year from 1,242 in 2002.

Led by United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an anti-polio army comprising government functionaries, activists and voluntary workers, has fought a relentless battle against the easily preventable disease that disables one for life.

A cursory look at figures reveals the extent of the task — in 2002, of the 1,918 cases detected globally in nine countries, 1,600 were in India and as many as 1,242 in Uttar Pradesh alone.

In the months between January 1 and July 12 this year, the global count stood at 759 in 13 countries, but India’s share dipped to 23 though Uttar Pradesh still counted for 12 of the cases.

It has been a long story of fighting prejudice against immunisation of the disease, ignorance in the minority community that the drops might cause impotence later on in life and distrust against the government for focusing so much on a single disease — which has been eradicated from much of the globe.

And Hapur in Ghaziabad district, adjoining New Delhi, perhaps epitomises the struggle best. It remains one of the 12 polio-endemic areas in western Uttar Pradesh where the virus has been hitting back after every immunisation round.

“We are therefore concentrating a lot of our efforts in these areas,” said Ms Priyanka Khanna of UNICEF. ‘Efforts’ translates into a painstaking door-to-door exercise where the team visits each household in every village to ensure that all children under five are immunised.

“When UNICEF stepped in to rid the state of the dreaded disease three years ago, 65 per cent of the world’s polio cases were detected here,” Ms Khanna said. And the reasons were not too far to seek.

“I have no hesitation in admitting that when the UNICEF team walked in here for the first time to administer polio drops to our children, we were very apprehensive,” said Mr Haji Sirajuddin Quraishi of Majeedpura.

“A lot of people here believed that polio drops would eventually lead people to impotency, so parents not only kept polio vaccinators at a safe distance but even intimidated them at times.” Mr Quraishi recalled how a mother locked up her two-year-old child in a cupboard when the team came to administer the drops. Yet another time, a woman locked up her baby in a fridge when the team arrived at the door.

“It took some time before realisation dawned that all the talk about impotency was wrong and the polio vaccine was actually good for children,” asserted Mr Quraishi. Evidently, none of the celebrity-based advertisements worked as much as the involvement of local, influential people, particularly religious and spiritual leaders.

Things changed in Majeedpura after Mr Quraishi himself took the lead in pushing the anti-polio mission by personally reaching out to the people. About 30 km away in Vait town, Mr Qazi Shaukat Ali, head of the Jamia Arabia Aizazul Uloom madrassa, attempted to explain why his community was so wary of immunising their children.

“Perhaps the ghost of the sterilisation campaign carried out during the emergency days (1975-77) continue to haunt the minds of people who fell prey to rumours that the vaccine was a ploy to make Muslims impotent,” Mr Ali told IANS.

Once Mr Ali was convinced, he too went out of his way to spread the positive word about the vaccine. Said Mr Subhash Singh, among UNICEF’s 1,800 social mobilisation co-ordinators engaged in the door-to-door campaign in western Uttar Pradesh: “Qazi Shaukat Ali gave us tremendous support to kill the canard about the polio vaccine. Besides addressing gatherings, he even issued printed appeals.”

Significantly, the immunisation teams include a large number of local Muslim women to increase trust perceptions. Like 19-year-old Razia, who goes house-to-house recording details of every child, or Nafisa, an official vaccinator of the state health department doing rounds with her.

“When we undertook the polio eradication programme in this locality in 2003, we encountered as many as 3,000 families who refused to get their kids vaccinated. Today, that number has come down to just 23. Of these, seven happened to be Hindu families,” said Mr Daya Shankar, a district level health official looking after the programme in Hapur.

But polio eradication is not only about immunisation but also educating the people about cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene. “The trouble in Uttar Pradesh is insanitation. Faecal material is the biggest carrier of the polio virus, so we have to continue educating our masses about sanitation, besides making them realise that immunisation was absolutely essential,” said Mr Shankar.

“And if we are able to do that, I am sure the day is not far when we will be able to make Uttar Pradesh a polio-free state.” Amen to that.

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