In the two-day special drive, termed as a mop-up campaign, a total of 201,585 children below five years of age are expected to receive polio drops.[break] Of the total targeted children, 227,517 are in three districts of the Valley --Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur -- alone.
A total of 27,218 volunteers have been mobilized to administer Oral Polio Vaccines (OPV) to children. The Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP), with technical support from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), announced the mop-up program following the report of polio being transmitted more locally in Rautahat district.
In 2010, five cases of polio have already been detected. Of them, while two are imported cases, three are locally originated. The detection of five polio cases implies that around 5,000 people have already been affected by the viral infectious disease, according to health experts. However, only one child, out of each 1,000 polio-affected people, gets severely paralyzed. Others easily resist it.
Valley at risk
Although no polio case has been detected in the valley in the recent times, children in all three districts are at the risk of polio. Health officials fear that those who enter the capital from any of Tarai districts may transfer polio viruses in the valley. "The floating population of the valley has posed a serious danger," said Krishna Bahadur Chanda, Immunization Program Chief at Department of Health Services (DoHS). "Hence, we have expanded the mop-up campaign into all three districts of the valley."
However, by government officials´ own confession, vaccination campaigns are not as effective in the valley as in villages. Health officials always find it difficult to keep a track record of the migrant population in urban area. Similarly, volunteers involved in door-to-door campaigns always complain of difficulties in reaching out to those people who reside in big bungalows and apartments.
"Dogs shoo away volunteers when they enter big houses," said Bishwo Ram Shrestha, chief of District Public Health Office, kathmandu. "Similarly, they can not go up to top floors of big apartments." The difficulty in penetrating into the core part of cities has adversely hindered the government´s target of providing oral polio vaccines to all children below five years of age.
In some cases, the mindset of elite people in the valley is more backward than that of those living in rural villages. "In villages, parents do not oppose, no matter how many time we administer vaccines to their children," Dr Sudhir Khanal, the focal person for immunization drive at UNICEF, told Republica.
"In cities, some elite class parents prevent volunteers from administering vaccines to their children. They wrongly think that their children have already had enough doses and more drops of polio may cause side-effects. It is not true. The more children have vaccines, the more they get protected from polio," he added.
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