Vajpayee rushes to review UP experiment

The state with 88 per cent of polio cases in the country is finally getting its act together. At the last immunisation drive on January 5, 5...

The state with 88 per cent of polio cases in the country is finally getting its act together. At the last immunisation drive on January 5, 57,000 personnel were present at 75,432 booths in UP to administer polio drops.

Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee is holding a review of the polio drive tomorrow, Union Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha came in September to add star power to appeals for immunisation and Chief Minister Mayawati signalled she means business by recently transferring six chief medical officers (CMOs) from districts with the maximum cases.

But the road ahead is long and hard. Sixty-five of UP’s 70 districts have registered polio cases and on January 5, only 38 per cent of the children in the age group of zero to five in the state came for immunisation.

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From 1995 till January 5, there have been 17 Pulse Polio immunisation campaigns in the state, each costing over Rs 10 crore. The number of booths and personnel manning them sees an increase every year.

Different reasons are offered for why the cases are still rising. Minister for Family Planning Phagu Chauhan says members of the minority community stay away from the drives as many believe polio drops lead to impotency or even AIDS. In Kanpur, a Muslim family refused to get the drop administered to their child till CMO N.B.L. Srivastava himself intervened.

The government has managed to assuage some of these fears by involving prominent leaders from the minority community, including Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) Naseem Ahmed.

Others point out that the potency of the drops decrease if not kept under proper refrigeration, and going by the poor power situation in the state, that is almost impossible.

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A pediatrician, Anivash Chawla, blames the wide gap between planning and execution. For example in Gonda district, where 23 polio cases were detected, a three-member WHO team pulled up officials for not performing.

During his September trip, Shatrughan Sinha also blamed the high number of cases in UP on ‘‘improper immunisation, misinformation among the target audience and, above all, poor monitoring’’. Asked to comment on the failure to keep the vaccine potent, the Minister said: ‘‘Well, we have received no such complaint.’’

But Minister for Medical Health and Welfare Mahendra Aridaman Singh admits six CMOs who were transferred recently for ‘‘concealing facts about the number of cases in their districts during the polio drive’’.

The state’s concern is understandable. After only a few cases were reported till mid-2002, it planned to declare the year a ‘‘polio-free year’’ . Now the government feels even 2005, the year set by the National Health Policy to eradicate polio, may not be a realistic deadline.