Government battles Taliban's campaign against polio vaccinations

PESHAWAR – The Taliban has kept millions of Pakistani children from receiving polio vaccinations, calling them a Western plot. Now the children run the risk of disability and death.

“We didn’t have vaccination teams for the past two years because of Taliban opposition", lamented Swat resident Irshad Ali. "My son didn't receive vaccine and is crippled now".

Last October, medics confirmed that then-14-month-old Javed Ali had polio.

Efforts by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the government to eradicate polio have run afoul of the Taliban’s opposition in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Last year doctors confirmed polio in 20 children in Swat and 14 in Bajaur Agency. None of the victims had received the vaccine, which the Taliban bans in areas it controls.

“Polio vaccine is a tool of the West to render recipients sterile and to reduce the Muslim population", Swat Valley Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said before authorities arrested him last September. Muslims should wait until they contract the disease before seeking treatment, he said.

Some medics have become casualties of militants while fighting the disease. In 2007, Bajaur Agency surgeon Abdul Ghani Khan and two vaccinators were killed in a roadside blast while returning from a polio-related function.

Taliban intimidation and conspiracy theories have undercut the country's struggle to comply with the WHO’s Polio Eradication Initiative, which began in 1994.

The country saw improvement this decade before Taliban control of Khyber Paktunkhwa and FATA caused the number of cases to rise again, from a historic low of 28 nationwide cases in 2005, to 117 in 2008. It subsided to 89 in 2009. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA accounted for 49 cases in 2009.

As of April 18, Pakistan has recorded 12 cases this year, including four from FATA and three from Khyber Paktunkhwa.

A resurgence of polio could spread to other countries. Nigeria, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan — which combined for 1,256 of the world's 1,606 reported cases in 2009 — could reintroduce the disease to countries that have been polio-free for decades.

For example, in July 2007 a 22-year-old Pakistani student at the University of Melbourne became the first confirmed polio patient in Australia since 1986. He contracted the virus while picnicking in Swat.

Elsewhere, the WHO has sent a team to Tajikistan to investigate a polio outbreak. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on April 25 that the disease had killed ten Tajik children.

The source of that outbreak is not known, but Tajikistan borders Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those countries had the third and fourth most cases worldwide of polio (89 and 38, respectively) in 2009.

More than 100,000 children in Bajaur – more than half the target population – are persistently inaccessible to vaccination staff, thanks mostly to Taliban intimidation. Bushra, a resident of Dama Dola, never received the oral polio vaccine (OPV) before the disease struck her at the age of nine months.

“I would have taken my daughter for vaccination outside Bajaur, had I known the repercussions", her father, Rahmanuddin, told Central Asia Online. "Now my daughter will be disabled her whole life".

The OPV is safe, WHO Pakistan Chief Dr Khalif Mahmud Bile said. He also blasted the militant claim that the vaccine contains anti-fertility agents.

"The vaccine is procured by UNICEF, which met the specifications set by the Expert Committee on Biological Standardization", he said. More than a billion children have received the vaccine over the past 22 years without any reported side effects, he added.

Taliban leader Maulana Fazalullah railed against the OPV and forbade medics from administering vaccines, recalled Ali, father of the 14-month-old polio victim in Swat.

In some areas, local hard-line clerics have taken up the Taliban’s cause, ordering parents to avoid the OPV. It is part of an “anti-Muslim agenda of eliminating the (Muslim) race”, prayer leader Gul Rehman said in Par Hoti Mardan during an April 23 sermon.

The government has persuaded other religious leaders to speak in favour of vaccination. “Parents should inoculate their children against any disease as it is their religious responsibility", Maulana Jalal Shah, in South Waziristan, said in a decree issued early this year.

Besides the government and the UN, a dozen countries have provided $1.5 billion per year to fight the crippling ailment in Pakistan.

But the health ministry had to put off the polio campaign in Bajaur Agency in August 2009 after armed men beat up vaccinators in the Charmang area.

The situation is improving, though, said Dr Mujahid Hussain, the top polio officer in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“In Swat, we have vaccinated all 365,000 children after the eviction of the Taliban. End militancy, and the situation will improve”, he said.