Covid-19 hampers polio campaigns, world body told.

Byline: Ikram Junaidi

ISLAMABAD -- With one more case of polio reported in the country, Pakistan on Tuesday informed the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) for Polio that the Covid-19 pandemic had also been a reason for a surge in polio cases in the country as it had hampered routine immunisation and campaigns against the crippling disease.

The top world polio body, headed by Sir Liam Donaldson, was informed that though the government had been considering initiating anti-polio activities, due to a high-risk perception of Covid-19 it would require immense hard work to gain the willingness of communities to open their doors to vaccinators. It was apprised that an upsurge of vaccine-preventable diseases was expected as the country had already started witnessing measles cases in some districts.

The IMB works on behalf of international donor agencies and issues reports on the performance of countries after every six months. In November 2012, the IMB recommended that travel restrictions should be imposed on Pakistan. The recommendations were implemented on May 5, 2014 due to which it is mandatory for everyone travelling abroad to get vaccinated.

Another polio case reported in KP, taking national tally to 56

Giving Pakistan's viewpoint, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister (SAPM) on Health Dr Zafar Mirza told the IMB during a video conference that 2019 proved to be an extremely challenging year for the anti-polio programme.

'The October 2019 IMB meeting raised as many as four issues - dysfunctional team, politicisation of the programme, community mistrust and programme performance. We redefined our priorities and assembled ourselves defining 2020 as the year of transformation and 2021 as the year to stop transmission,' he added.

The SAPM said the national team had been reorganised, rebuilding the one team approach at the federal and provincial levels.

'We started with bringing the coordinator back into the programme who understood the programme and rules of engagement as well as the benefits of a unified team. I am pleased to state today that we now have a strong one team that interacts effectively with a sense of collective responsibility. There is encouraging response from our political leadership. We all have witnessed the level of engagement across all parties starting from December 2019,' he said.

'We are now feeding findings of anthropological assessments directly into the development of community engagement strategies in difficult areas...