Over 2 million children immunised in special cross-border campaign

Tens of thousands of under-five children have been immunised against polio along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan common border in a special three-day polio vaccination campaign which concluded on Thursday.

“Large scale population movements and security issues stand in the way of reaching every child in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas with polio vaccine. The purpose, therefore, of this special campaign is to find and immunise every child under five years of age in this very high-risk area to boost immunity against polio,” Melissa Corkum, a communications officer with the polio eradication programme of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said.

Over two million Pakistani and Afghan children under five years of age have been vaccinated during this special cross border polio eradication campaign aimed to stem the spread of the polio virus in the border areas.

In addition to a common border of over 2,250 km between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the socio-cultural values of the people of the bordering districts are also the same with regular population movements across the border.

The current poliovirus epidemiology and genetics provide evidence of virus sharing between the two countries. An estimated over 1.7 million children under five years of age annually cross Pak-Afghan border.

“Another important fact is that 51 percent of Afghans living in Pakistan originate from the 11 Afghan provinces of Kandahar, Nangarhar, Kabul, Paktya, Baghalan, Kunduz, Laghman, Logar, Hilmand, Kunar and Balkh, which makes these border areas high risk,” Corkum noted.

To date, some 36 cases of polio have been reported in Pakistan during the year of 2006. “Of which, a total of 58 percent of these cases are Pashto speaking and 15 percent of cases have Afghan origin,” the UNICEF officer said. Afghanistan has reported 29 cases this year.

The three-day vaccination exercise covered a selected three high-risk districts of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province and four districts of Pakistan’s western Balochistan province, with another 10 border districts and tribal agencies of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Hundreds of volunteers and health workers were deployed to carry out the door-to-door immunisation effort.

“This year we have seen a large number of [polio] cases linked to cross border movements between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This reinforces that until polio is stopped on both sides of our borders, we will continue to share [the] virus between our two countries,” Muhammad Nasir Khan, Pakistan’s health minister, said on Tuesday while launching the joint vaccination drive at the Pak-Afghan border point of Torkham.

Given the scale of population movements, the health authorities of the two countries have agreed to increase the number of permanent cross border vaccination posts at the entry points in Balochistan and NWFP, from an existing two to seven in 2007.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are currently among the four globally polio-endemic countries together with India and Nigeria, while another 16 other countries have reported sporadic polio cases in 2006.

But while Pakistan continues to have polio cases, the South Asian nation is on the verge of eliminating the crippling disease, experts maintain.

“In a recent expert meeting in Geneva, it was stated that Pakistan has the opportunity to become the next country to achieve polio-free status, if high-quality campaigns within the country can be maintained,” the UNICEF official said.

TS/DS