Huge number of women involved in anti-polio drive

More women than ever before have taken part in national immunisation days in southern Afghanistan, and particularly in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, IRIN learnt at the weekend. "This is a milestone as we draw closer to stopping the polio virus in Afghanistan," the resident programme organiser for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in southern Afghanistan, Douglas Higgins, told IRIN at a ceremony held in conjunction with local authorities to launch the programme in Kandahar on Sunday. Some 75 vaccination teams, each comprising two Afghan female volunteers, will be visiting homes in the city to administer polio drops to children over a three-day period, from Sunday to Tuesday. "It is important to have more women leading the teams, as women at home with children will be more welcoming," he said. This, Higgins said, was also the first time they had been able to hold meetings with women and girls in schools, who would take the message home to allow vaccination teams into their homes. "This is a great achievement," Higgins stressed. The campaign was also advertised on local radio and television across the southern region. Polio affects children mainly under the age of five, paralysing the limbs and trunk muscles and preventing them from reaching their full physical potential. "It is a very cruel disease. But it is preventable, and we hope to stop it and eradicate it from Afghanistan by the end of this year," he said. It was important to reach all children under the age of five with at least two polio drops, he stressed, saying that they were now extremely close to eradicating the crippling disease in the battered nation. Supported by UNICEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO) in collaboration with the local health ministry, the teams aim to cover more than 100,000 children in the southern region alone and approximately 27,000 of those are in Kandahar city. "We need to focus on areas where wild polio has been reported, and Kandahar is our primary area," Higgins said, adding that of the 11 polio cases reported in the country last year, nine were in the Kandahar area. The governor of Kandahar Province launched the immunisation days by feeding children with drops at the ceremony. "We are very, very lucky and grateful that this problem has been controlled in our country as we have so many other problems," the governor, Haji Gul Agha Shirzai, told IRIN. Over the past two years UNICEF Afghanistan has spent US $2 million to ensure the eradication of polio in a country which is now one of very few where the disease remains prevalent.