How an anti-polio campaign was stopped in Pakistan

It all started with rumors that children fainted or vomited after being vaccinated against the polio virus in a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, northwestern Pakistan.

Then religious mosques in the area rang the alarm with loudspeakers, urging parents not to let health workers immunize their children against this deadly disease.

Meanwhile, anti-vaccination propaganda videos quickly became viral on social media, with one of them claiming that children had been "poisoned" by the drops.

Rumors from a suburb of the provincial capital, Peshawar, then claimed that children had died after receiving the vaccine.

As rumors spread, thousands of panicky parents took their children by car, motorbike and on foot to major hospitals in the city, forcing stunned health facilities to declare emergencies.

The panic then turned into anger, a crowd setting fire to a local medical clinic in a suburb of Peshawar.

Rumors have been extremely exaggerated. Health officials said that only several of the 25,000 children transported to hospitals suffered from vomiting or stomach pain; there were no deaths.

The dramatic events of April 22 highlighted the main obstacles to the eradication of polio in Pakistan, one of three countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, suffering from the disease, an infantile virus that can cause paralysis or death.

The authorities arrested members of the crowd who burned the clinic and arrested those behind the propaganda videos. The Minister of Health appealed to parents on television to convince them that the vaccines were safe.

But the damage was done. The mbad panic ended the April 23-25 ​​immunization campaign in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bringing a new blow to ongoing efforts to permanently eradicate the disease from this deeply religious and conservative South Asian nation.

Many people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a largely rural and poor city, have long suspected the vaccine. Clerics and conservative Islamist militants claimed that it was a Western plot to hurt or sterilize children.

Meanwhile, on April 27, Pakistani health officials announced that they had suspended the anti-polio campaign throughout the country following the badbadination of a health worker and two police officers escorting vaccination teams.

& # 39; A nightmare & # 39;

Riaz Khan was at work in Peshawar when he received a call from friends living in the suburbs of Mashokhel.

"They said that children died after taking the vaccine," he said. "I was so scared for my kids that I could not even think about the authenticity of the news."

The 35-year-old rushed home to find his children, who had received the vaccine that day, and took them to the hospital.

"At the hospital, the doctors told me that there was no problem with my children," Khan said.

Muhammad Asim, a manager at Lady Reading Hospital, one of the city's three major health facilities, described what he termed a "nightmare".

"Over the past 15 years, we have gone through many emergencies due to bomb blasts and victims of terrorism, but it was a nightmare," he said.

Asim said the 500-bed hospital was overwhelmed by about 5,000 children and their families within 12 hours of spreading rumors.

"They literally smothered our system," he said, adding that the three main hospitals in Peshawar had been flooded by more than 25,000 children within 24 hours.

"All our doctors and nurses were trying to rebadure worried parents that nothing had happened to their children," he said. "We put ads of renowned doctors on social media to calm the population, but it was as if no one was ready to hear or believe it." I personally Asked hundreds of kids and they said they felt very normal. "

"He has returned"

Dr. Shabeer Ahmad, coordinator of the province's Ministry of Health anti-polio campaign, announced the decision to add vitamin A to polio vaccine to help children with malnutrition.

He said that if taken on an empty stomach, vitamin A may cause vomiting or stomach pain.

Ahmad said that this had happened to a few children in Mashokhel, where he claimed that angry parents set fire to a local clinic that was administering the vaccines. No one was injured in the fire.

"We added vitamin A because it boosts the immune system and helps the vaccine to be more effective," said Dr. Akram Shah, director of the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), a provincial agency. "But that turned against us, we had to stop the campaign in many areas."

Shah said that Pakistan has long opposed vaccination efforts and that "propagandists have used the situation and pushed it to a new level".

Despite the obstacles, Pakistani health workers, together with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international aid groups, have vaccinated millions of children across the country since 2012 by carrying out more than 100 vaccination campaigns.

The effort brought the number of polio cases to eight, up from more than 300 in 2014.

Extremist propaganda

Public health studies conducted in Pakistan have shown that maternal illiteracy and low knowledge of vaccines on vaccines – as well as poverty and rural residence – are the factors that most often influence the fact that children are vaccinated against the polio virus.

Another factor is that conservative Islamic clerics and militants in the region spread propaganda that the vaccine was sterilizing young boys.

Anti-vaccination propaganda has also been fueled by mistrust of Western governments funding immunization programs – particularly after the CIA reportedly organized a fictitious hepatitis vaccination campaign in 2011 to confirm the location of the vaccination program. Al-Qaeda group leader, O was killed by US SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Since then, some clerics have even published fatwas saying that children who become paralyzed or die of polio are "martyrs" because they refused to be trapped by a Western plot.

Pakistani activists also announced that vaccines manufactured in the West contained pork fat or alcohol, two substances banned in Islam.

Activists have kidnapped, beaten and murdered dozens of vaccinators or their armed police escorts in recent years in an effort to end local polio campaigns.

A police officer was shot dead by gunmen on April 23 when he was about to join a polio team in Bannu district, in the north-west of the country. A day later, gunmen shot and killed another policeman overseeing a polio eradication team in the remote district of Buner.

A polio worker was shot dead by gunmen in neighboring Balochistan province on 25 April.