By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 6 2004 (IPS)

Global plans to eradicate the polio virus continue to flounder in a handful of districts in India’s Uttar Pradesh state that adjoin the national capital.

Uttar Pradesh is now regarded as the polio capital of India, accounting for more than 53 percent of the country’s burden of the crippling paediatric disease and is seriously hampering a programme aimed at eradication that India has been running since 1995.

Union Health ministry officials are inclined to blame resistance to polio immunisation by some members among the Muslim community that forms a sizeable section of the population in the districts of Ghaziababd, Badayun, Bulandshahr, Etawah and Moradabad in the western part of Uttar Pradesh, a state with population exceeding 170 million people.

Badayun with seven cases and Moradabad with five are the worst affected districts this year so far.

”Some Muslim families in these districts continue to resist immunisation in the belief that we are trying to sterilise them despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise,” said a health ministry official asking not to be named.

The official’s view was supported by the fact that of the 15 cases of polio reported so far this year from Uttar Pradesh,11 were those of children from Muslim families.

”We need a special campaign to reach Muslim families and convince them of the need to cooperate if we are to eradicate polio in this country,” the official told IPS.

Apart from routine immunisations India also conducts two ‘pulse’ immunisation campaigns every year in December and January that are designed to reach all vulnerable infants on a single day in an attempt to replace the wild virus that thrives in the guts of young children with the attenuated one used in the vaccines.

Polio is crippling because the virus, which is transmitted through water or food contaminated with faecal matter, attacks the brain and nervous system resulting in paralysis or death.

Some 200 million doses of oral vaccine are administered on a single day by teams that fan out across India during the drives to reach all children in the country under the age of five.

But such has been the resistance immunisation efforts in Uttar Pradesh and also in adjoining Bihar that health workers risk being beaten up by irate Muslim villagers who believe that the administration of oral polio drops is part of a global conspiracy people of their faith.

Similar attitudes have been reported from other parts of the world notably Kano state in Nigeria where members of the Muslim clergy have spread the idea that the drops are designed to cause sterility.

Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia are the other countries where the wild polio virus continues to thrive and cripple children.

In India, to counter false rumours and beliefs Rotary International and United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) which have been funding the pulse polio programmes, have roped in support from religious leaders and academics from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), an influential institution in western Uttar Pradesh.

The AMU’s efforts were being led by vice-chancellor Naseem Ahmed who personally took a hand in administering polio drops to infants in reluctant Muslim homes.

Additionally a campaign over television involving leading film stars and cricketers has been mounted to urge people to participate in the one-day drives.

India’s efforts are crucial to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative that is spearheaded by the World Health Organisation, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCs) and UNICEF.

The global initiative was launched in 1988 when the disease was known to be endemic in 125 countries affecting 350,000 people annually but by 2002 that figure was reduced to just 1,866 people chalking up a remarkable success.

Europe, the Americas and China have achieved eradication but cannot dispense with vaccination as long the wild virus continues to exist in India and the other six countries that seem to mock at a deadline for total eradication now set for 2005 – five years behind the original target of 2000.

Still India has made remarkable progress from scenario of the 1980s when the country recorded 20,000 new cases annually.

According to Dr. Jacob John an expert on polio based in southern Tamil Nadu the goal of polio eradication is not only to eliminate a dangerous paediatric disease but also to eventually save the world the high cost of routine vaccinations.

But Dr. Johan believes that vaccinations may have to continue well beyond 2005 to maintain high levels of immunity to pre- empt the possibility of vaccine viruses mutating to wild states and triggering off epidemics.

”Wild polio viruses or virus-containing specimens are still being held in laboratories in many countries that can easily spread through populations that have not been immunised, if released accidentally or even deliberately as biological warfare,” Dr.John told IPS. (END/IPS/AP/HE/DV/PR/WD/RDR/SI/04)

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