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ISLAMABAD: The spread of rumors on social media earlier this year that some children had been poisoned from contaminated polio vaccines has caused high refusal rates in Pakistan since, a senior World Health Orgarnization (WHO) official said on Thursday, leaving over three million children unvaccinated
The rumors, including that some children had died from polio vaccinations, were spread on social media platforms in April by religious hard-liners in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The misinformation triggered mass panic in the province as mobs burned a village health center, blocked a highway and pelted cars with stones. Medical workers were harassed and threatened and panicked parents rushed their children to hospitals, overwhelming health authorities.
Families of hundreds of thousands of children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and elsewhere have since refused to participate in polio campaigns to eradicate the virus that can cause paralysis and death.
“The incidents caused by false rumors are the main cause of missing vaccinations,” Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, Pakistan team leader for polio at the World Health Organization (WHO), told Arab News in an interview on Thursday.
Other than the April rumors which led to two million refusals, Mahamud said a similar incident in Nawabshah in the southern Sindh province caused an additional one million families to refuse vaccination.
As WHO marked October 24, World Polio Day, to raise awareness and resources in support of polio eradication efforts, it said global polio cases had been cut by more than 99% since 1988. However, type 1 polio virus is still endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it has infected a total of 88 people this year. That is a resurgence from a record low global annual figure of 22 cases in 2017.
Polio invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours. It cannot be cured, but infection can be prevented by vaccination — and a dramatic reduction in cases worldwide in recent decades has been due to intense national and regional immunization campaigns in babies and children.
In unvaccinated populations, however, polio viruses can re-emerge and spread swiftly. Cases of vaccine-derived polio can also occur in places where immunity is low and sanitation is poor, as vaccinated people can excrete the virus, putting the unvaccinated at risk.
The polio infection also has seasonal peaks and epidemics in the summer and fall in temperate areas, and repeats its season after every 3 to 4 years, Mahamud said, adding that eradication efforts had to target the off-peak season for the virus to be wiped out for good.
“Last time this cycle hit Pakistan was in 2014 when there were 306 cases reported but this year so far, we have recorded 76 cases. As long as the virus exist in three major hubs — Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta — the whole country is at risk,” Mahamud said.
He said the vaccine used in Pakistan was well tested and secure: “It has been used in many countries, all propaganda regarding its negative effects is false.”
Mahamud added: “It is a false assumption that polio teams do not take proper care of vaccination as they are the same people who took the numbers of polio cases from more than 30,000 to only 8 in 2017 within two decades.”
Mahamud said even if all of 39.5 million children under the age of 5 years were vaccinated in Pakistan this year, it would still take 18 months to show results.
“WHO is providing all technical assistance for capacity building at the national, provincial and district level,” he said. “The Pakistani government has taken $160 million from Islamic Development Bank for this program and we are facilitating in distribution of that fund to the frontline workers”.
State minister for health Dr. Zafar Mirza said the government was taking multiple steps to make Pakistan polio free in the next 2-3 years.
“The government has worked very intensely during the last two months, to find the best team to serve the purpose of eradicating polio from Pakistan,” he said on the sidelines of a ceremony organized to commemorate World Polio Day in Islamabad. “Now we have the best professionals to lead our national and provincial emergency operation centers.”
The minister said 260,000 polio workers in total were working to vaccinate children even in the most remote areas: “We are plugging in all the gaps we found at the union council, district, provincial and national level … We have figured out many problems and now trying to solve them through practical steps.”