Japan pledges US $10 million for anti-polio drive

The Japanese government has pledged 1.83 billion yen, or approximately US $10 million, to help Pakistan in its drive to eradicate polio, according to an official from the UN children's agency UNICEF. Minoru Shibuya, the Japanese ambassador, and Omar Abdi, the UNICEF representative in Pakistan, signed an agreement on Thursday according to which the amount pledged by the Japanese government would be used to procure approximately 93 million doses of the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV), Dr Rafah Aziz, a senior UNICEF health project officer, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. “93 million doses of the OPV constitute about 42 percent of the total polio vaccine requirement for 2004,” she said, adding that other donor organisations would help UNICEF, which had been coordinating and overseeing polio eradication initiatives in Pakistan, to acquire the remainder of the required doses. “The World Bank will help us get another 78 million doses,” Aziz maintained, noting that the first objective of the anti-polio drive was to stop the transmission of the disease. The Japanese government, though, has been most active in helping Pakistan in its nationwide campaign to get rid of the debilitating illness, having contributed approximately US $38.51 million to Pakistan’s polio eradication initiative since 1996. The number of confirmed polio cases had sharply declined from 1803 in 1993 to 92 confirmed cases, reported from 44 districts across the country, until this month for the year 2003, a UNICEF press release said, adding that even though the number of reported cases has remained constant when compared to the preceding year, the target of interrupting polio transmission by the year 2005 remained within reach. Pakistan started its campaign against polio in 1994 with the first round of National Immunisation Days (NIDs). Since then, 40 successful rounds of national and sub-national immunisation days have been held. The next six months, though, were very critical and anti-polio crusaders were poised before a make-or-break situation, Omar Abdi, the UNICEF country representative, told IRIN. “This is the peak season where we’ve usually witnessed the highest number of reported cases. However, if you look at the last three or four months, the number of reported cases is about one-third from the same period last year,” he explained. The requirement, now, was to maintain the impetus, particularly in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) which usually reported the highest number of cases, Abdi said. “We have NIDs planned in the first three months of the year. We need to ensure that those campaigns are of good quality and we can reduce the number of children that might have been missed out in earlier rounds,” he stressed.