New Delhi, February 25
Pakistan today blamed the war on terror for delay in the eradication of polio and said it would seek India’s help in eliminating this disease from the country.

Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Inter-provincial Coordination Mir Hazar Khan Bijrani, here to attend the Polio Summit, said his government would soon send teams to India to get trained in vaccine delivery strategies that enable health workers to target high risk populations like migrants.

“I have spoken with the Health Minister of India and will send our experts to learn from the Indian experience,” Bijrani said on the sidelines of the summit.

Persistent pockets of polio transmission on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and northern Nigeria are the current focus of polio eradication initiative of the WHO. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria remain polio endemic countries although it is huge progress since 1988 when 125 countries were endemic. An endemic country is one where the wild poliovirus has never stopped circulating.

Bijrani said the war on terror was hampering vaccination of children as health workers were unable to reach remote areas. “A major obstacle is Pakistan’s fight against terror which has made a number of areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan Provinces bordering Afghanistan highly volatile. We are talking to tribal chiefs to help us reach children for immunisation. They realize that this is important,” Bijrani said.

Pakistan is, meanwhile, not concerned about any import of cases from India and said Afghanistan was more of a challenge. “We don’t have a very sealed border with Afghanistan. That is a concern, not India,” he said. In Pakistan, polio has been declared a public health emergency.

As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries remain at risk of contracting polio. In the past three years, 40 previously polio-free countries have been re-infected due to imports of the virus.

Another challenge for Pakistan is large influx of population out of the troubled areas and routine seasonal migration from one region of the country to another. This allows the poliovirus to move from endemic districts to those free from polio.

“We have identified vulnerable districts and will focus there,” Bijrani said, considering India faces the risk of importation of the poliovirus from across the border.

The minister added that Pakistan wanted to follow in India’s footsteps. “We want to learn from India its experiences in reaching the goal of zero case of polio and in raising its routine immunization coverage which is the backbone not only of polio eradication but also elimination of measles and neonatal tetanus,” he said, terming as dismal Pakistan’s polio infection scenario.

The country saw 198 infections in 2011. This year it has seen 11 so far.