Patient and leading health organisations in South Africa have now joined a Fix the Patent Laws campaign launched in 2011 by Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to push for reform of the country’s current patent laws.

The campaign’s promoters say that these laws severely restrict access to affordable medicines for all people living in South Africa.

The organisations which have adhered to the campaign are: People Living With Cancer (PLWC), South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), DiabetesSA, CanSurvive, SA Federation for Mental Health (SAFMH), Stop Stock Outs, Cancer Association of Southern Africa (CANSA), Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Alliance (SABDA), South African Non-Communicable Diseases Alliance (SANCD Alliance), Marie Stopes, Epilepsy South Africa and Cape Mental Health.

Together, they are calling on the South African government to finalise a National Policy on Intellectual Property that champions measures to reduce prices and increase access to a wide range of medicines for people in need across the country.

TAC and MSF reported Jun. 1 that the expanded coalition of organisations represents public and private sector patients in South Africa seeking treatment and care for a range of cancers, mental illnesses, diabetes and other non-communicable diseases – as well as tuberculosis, HIV and sexual and reproductive health diseases.

South Africa currently grants patents on almost every patent application it receives, allowing companies to maintain lengthy monopoly periods on medicines, argues the campaign. This keeps prices of many medicines higher in South Africa than in many other countries.

According to TAC and MSF, it is estimated that 80 percent of patents granted in South Africa do not meet the country’s patentability criteria. This is largely due to the fact that patents are granted without substantive examination of applications to ensure that patentability criteria are met.

“Some cancer patients would rather go to other countries, like India, for treatment – the combined cost of the flight, medical services and drugs is cheaper than buying the drugs alone in South Africa,” said Bernice Lass of cancer group, CanSurvive.

Linda Greeff of PLWC said that her organisation was supporting the campaign because “we want to ensure that there is proper scrutiny of patent applications before patents are granted. We want a patent granting process that is ethical and transparent, so that more people can access the medicines that they need.”

According to Cassey Chambers of SADAG, the group deals with “patients every day who cannot afford medication or treatment, and as a result become more depressed, helpless, hopeless and even suicidal in some cases.”

DiabetesSA’s Keegan Hall stressed that as health organisations, “we have an obligation to take steps to improve affordability and access to medicines. The cost of insulin and other diabetes management tools are far too expensive for many patients,” Hall added.

Health organisations joining the Fix the Patent Laws campaign say that they recognise the opportunity South Africa has to improve access to medicines for all diseases through reforming problematic patent laws.

South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has already embarked on the process of legislative reform, releasing a Draft National Policy on Intellectual Property for public comment in 2013. The draft policy contained important commitments to reform the laws in order to restore the balance between public and private interest, in favour of people’s health.

The Fix the Patent Laws campaign coalition is calling for urgent approval of a finalised National Policy on Intellectual Property, as a critical first step toward reform of problematic patent laws and practices that deprive people living in South Africa of more affordable treatments for all conditions.

It notes that as a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), South Africa is required to uphold minimum standards of intellectual property protection as defined by the international Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This includes granting 20-year patents on medicines.

However, South Africa also has significant flexibility under TRIPS to amend national legislation in order to improve access to medicines. According to the health organisations, reforms could include the government taking measures to limit abusive patents being granted on medicines.

At the same time, it says, government could establish easier procedures for overcoming legitimate patent barriers when medicines are unaffordable, unavailable or not adapted for patient needs.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Slums in a Kenyan shanty town. Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, according to UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Photo credit: Colin Crowley/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Nompumelelo Tshabalala, 41, emerges from her dwarf ‘shack’ made up of rusty metal sheets and falls short of bumping into this reporter as she bends down to avoid knocking her head against the top part of her makeshift door frame.

“This has been my home for the past 16 years and I have lived here with my husband until his death in 2008 and now with my four children still in this two-roomed shack,” she told IPS.

Tshabalala lives in Diepkloof township in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a densely populated informal settlement – a euphemism for slums, where an estimated 15 million of the country’s approximately 52 million people live, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N. agency for human settlements.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe has an estimated 835,000 people living in informal settlements, according to Homeless International, a British non-governmental organisation focusing on urban poverty issues. “Local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs” – Precious Shumba, Harare Residents Trust

“Slum-dwelling here in Africa has become normal, a trend to live with, which is difficult to combat owing to numerous factors ranging from political corruption to economic inequalities necessitated by the growing gap between the rich and the poor,” Gilbert Nyaningwe, an independent development expert from Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Overall, out of an estimated population of 1.1 billion people, Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, reports UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Worldwide, notes the U.N. agency, the number of slum-dwellers now stands at 863 million and is set to shoot up to 889 million by 2020.

Development agencies in Africa say slum-dwelling remains a continental trend despite the U.N. Millennium Development Goals targets compelling all countries globally to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

According to the United Nations, that 100 million target “was met well in advance of the 2020 deadline”, and in African countries such as Egypt, Libya and Morocco the total number of urban slum dwellers has almost been halved, Tunisia has eradicated them completely, and Ghana, Senegal and Uganda have made steady progress, reducing their slum populations by up to 20 percent.

However, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest rate of “slum incidence” of any major world region, with millions of people living in settlements characterised by some combination of overcrowding, tenuous dwelling structures, and poor or no access to adequate water and sanitation facilities.

Hector Mutharika, a retired economist in late Malawian President Kamuzu Banda’s government, blamed poor service delivery for the increase in slums in Africa.

“The increasing numbers of slum dwellers in Africa is due to poor service delivery here by local authorities which more often than not worry most about filling their pockets from local authorities’ coffers instead of channelling proper housing facilities to poor people, which then pushes homeless individuals into building slum settlements anywhere,” Mutharika told IPS.

For Rwandan civil society activist Otapiya Gundurama, the roots of the problem go far back in time. “Shanty homes in Africa are a result of the continent’s urban infrastructure set up during colonial rule at which time housing and economic diversification were limited, with everything related to urban governance centralised, while towns and cities were established to enhance the lifestyles and interests of a minority,” Gundurama told IPS.

Some opposition politicians in Africa, like Gilbert Dzikiti, president of Zimbabwe’s opposition Democratic Assembly for Restoration and Empowerment (DARE), see the trend of growing slums here as a result of government failure. “The perpetual rise of slum settlements in Africa testifies to persistent failure by governments here to invest in both rural and urban development,” Dzikiti told IPS.

African civil society leaders blame rising unemployment on the continent for the continuing rise in the number of slums. “Be it in cities or remote areas, slums in Africa are a result of huge numbers of jobless people who hardly have the means to upgrade their own dwellings,” Precious Shumba, director of the Harare Residents Trust in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

In order to reverse the trend of growing slums across the continent, Shumba said, “local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs.”

African slum-dwellers like South Africa’s Tshabalala accuse city authorities of ignoring the mushrooming of informal settlements for selfish reasons.

“Slums here are sources of cheap labour that keeps the wheels of industry turning, which is why local authorities are not concerned about our living standards because they [local authorities] are getting more and more revenue from firms thriving on our sweat,” Tshabalala told IPS.

Meanwhile, rising slum settlements in Africa are also having a knock-on effect for other development goals in the education and health sectors for example.

“The United Nations Millennium Development Goal of universal attainment of primary education for all by the end of this year is certainly set to be missed by a number of countries here in Africa, especially as many of these sprouting slum settlements have no schools to help the children growing in the communities get any education,” a senior official in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education told IPS on the condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

At the same time, “there are often no toilets, no water and no clinics in most slum-dwelling areas here, exposing people to diseases, consequently derailing the MDG of halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases in informal settlements,” Owen Dliwayo of the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Despite the desperate lack of access to water for domestic use in Mwene Ditu, in the central Democratic Republic of Congo, Dieudonné Ilunga spent a good part of July blocking up residents’ wells.

“They’ve dug them in old cemeteries, in newly-demarcated lots, next to toilets,” said Ilunga, head of the Water Resources Research Department in the city, the second largest in DRC’s Kasaï-Orientale province.

Just ten percent of Mwene Ditu’s 600,000 residents are connected to the water supply network – and even for these lucky few, water flows through the taps only on Monday and Friday.

Vianney Muadi, a mother of two in the city’s Musadi neighbourhood, said she stores as much water as possible when it runs. “Sometimes, we go whole weeks without access,” she told IPS.

“But drinking water must not be left open to the air,” said Ilunga. He wants to see the network rehabilitated and extended into outlying neighbourhoods, but the public water utility, REGIDESO, is facing severe challenges across the province.

Few of the 3.3 million residents of the provincial capital, Mbuji Mayi, are served by the city’s aging pipe network.

“Our network only reaches 3,000 clients, and basically all of them are in Mbuji Mayi,” admitted Jean-Pierre Mbambu, head of the REGIDESO’s water works in the city.

Pipes are frequently damaged by uncontrolled runoff from rainwater. And even when these breaches are repaired, the utility is often unable to pump water, due to power outages. The provincial administration has tried to help with diesel to power generators, but this is a costly option – especially with REGIDESO struggling with funding problems linked to bankrupt customers.

The many people who are not connected to the grid have to fend for themselves. Dozens of boreholes have been drilled, particularly in Mwene Ditu, and in other parts of Kasaï-Orientale province in the east of the country.

People have also turned to rivers and springs near various towns for water.

“But these supply points are badly looked after and even less well protected,” said Placide Mukena Kabongo, head of the National Rural Water Department (SNHR) in Ngandanjika, some 90 kilometres southeast of Mbuji Mayi. He said his staff members were doing their best to explain to people how to prevent contamination of their water sources.

“SNHR dug 578 wells and constructed 480 water points in eight of the 16 territories that make up the province,” Mukena told IPS, adding that these waterworks dated back to colonial times though they were rehabilitated by the SNHR after independence.

Many other shallow wells have been dug by unemployed youth trying to earn a living. “But they’re doing this without respecting standards, making the quality of the water doubtful,” said Kankonde. He also complained about the use of unclean buckets to draw water and the absence of drainage to keep dirty water from pooling around the wells.

“We took a dead toad out of our well one day last year,” Adjany Tshimbombo told IPS. Since then, Tshimbombo, a student at the University of Mbuji Mayi, won’t drink the water without boiling it first.

The unsurprising consequence has been increasing rates of waterborne disease, according to provincial medical authorities.

Dr. Musole Kankonde, head of hygiene at the provincial health department, told IPS that diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery, bilharzia, and typhoid fever are affecting increasing numbers of people, striking children and adults alike, in both rural and urban areas.

“In just the first half of 2012, we recorded more than 79,000 cases of diarrhoea and dysentery, with 29 deaths,” said Jean-Pierre Katende Nsumba, the doctor in charge of disease control in the province.

Kankonde told IPS that his hands were tied when it comes to addressing the problem. “I can’t forbid people to drink water from wells or springs. All I can ask is that they maintain wells carefully and treat their drinking water to avoid falling ill,” he said.

His colleague Nsumba said people in the province are generally unable to afford water purification tablets. “I advise that all drinking water – whether it comes from REGIDESO, rivers, springs or wells – be boiled before use to prevent disease,” he said.

For far too many households in Burkina Faso, going to the toilet means heading for the bush. The Burkinabè government has launched a new campaign to change this, calling on prominent personalities as both sponsors and champions.

“It’s an initiative based on solidarity between individuals and communities in order to speed up construction of latrines and put an end to defecation in the open air – which is a widespread practice more or less everywhere in the country – and to reduce diseases linked to poor hygiene,” explained Halidou Koanda, who works for the non-governmental organisation WaterAid.

In 2011, WaterAid and the Burkinabè Ministry for Water and Agriculture carried out a survey of the home villages of 70 notable people from all walks of life, including members of parliament, government ministers, and former presidents, prominent business people and sports personalities.

“When we toured their home villages, we found the same thing everywhere: the rate of open air defecation was close to 95 percent,” Koanda told IPS.

“In rural areas, it’s not rare to see VIPs who are hosting guests in their home villages for some occasion find themselves struggling to provide facilities for their guests to relieve themselves,” he said.

According to a 2010 survey carried out by the National Institute for Statistics and Demographics (INSD), the rate of access to a toilet inside the household is just 3.1 percent nationally. Nearly ten percent of urban households have a latrine, whereas in rural areas that falls to less than one percent.

“Even though the government and its partners are spending money on sanitation, the number of projects being completed each year will not allow us to attain the Millennium Development Goal in 2015,” said Marie Denis Sondo, director general of waste water and excreta at the ministry for water and agriculture.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a series of development and anti-poverty targets agreed by U.N. member states in 2000. One of the targets is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

Faced with the slow progress on the question of hygiene and sanitation, the Burkinabè government and its partners launched a national campaign of advocacy and mobilisation for adequate access to sanitation in 2010.

At the end of the campaign, the government and its partners had constructed 617,000 household latrines and 13,200 public toilets built at a total cost of around 120.7 million dollars.

But the resources marshalled by the government and donors will not allow enough latrines to be built to reach the MDG in 2015, said WaterAid’s Koanda.

“So society’s leaders must lend their financial support to build latrines as well as give some of their time to raise awareness and mobilise people so that questions of hygiene and sanitation are prioritised,” Sondo told IPS.

The response to this call has come from the very top. The Burkinabè prime minister, Luc Adolphe Tiao, hails from the village of Pouni, a hundred kilometres south of the capital. Dominique Ido, Pouni’s mayor, told IPS the sanitation situation there is much the same as in other rural areas of the country.

“There are very few households with their own toilets in the village. Maybe two percent,” he said. “There are communal latrines in the schools and other public places, but people don’t use them at night. So we are hoping to bring everyone we can together around this initiative so we can increase the number of toilets between now and 2015.”

In August, the prime minister made his contribution. “The government decided last February that each person will make a gift of toilets in his village or neighbourhood. So I’ve constructed thirty in my village, hoping that this gesture will lead others to follow,” said Tiao.

“Sanitation has become a real problem in our country, and it’s an important indicator of development,” he said.

According to WaterAid, if significant numbers of VIPs follow the prime minister’s lead, it may still be possible to reach the MDG on sanitation.

To mobilise additional funding, the government and its partners also organised a “sanitation marathon” on public radio and television, which raised around 170,000 dollars.

“It’s the first time, but a successful effort. Now the government wants to see the initiative organised in each region so the most celebrated sons in each area can rally round the political and administrative authorities to make sure the question of toilets is no longer just a matter for the government,” said Koanda.

Arthur Kafando, the minister for commerce, said that his village, Rayongo, on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, is a newly subdivided area and lacks sanitation facilities. “I built a dozen toilets. We want to help people to understand the importance of these matters for their well-being. So we are going to appeal to many others to help us.”

Smallholder farmers around the Yaounde city centre are increasingly farming on urban wastewater sites. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Monde Kingsley Nfor
YAOUNDÉ, Aug 30 2012 (IPS)

Cameroonian urban famer Juliana Numfor has six plots of land where she grows maize, cassava, sweet potatoes and leafy vegetables, including cabbages, wild okra and greens.

The soil in which her crops grow is moist and visibly marshy, and a stream of water runs near it. But if you take a closer look you will notice that the water is dark and smells unpleasant.

In fact it is wastewater, which comes from a student residential quarter in Yaoundé, popularly called “Cradat”, that is less than 400 metres away from her plots of land.

But it is precisely thanks to the wastewater that Numfor is farming on this public land.

She told IPS that she prefers planting her crops on urban wastewater sites because she can easily irrigate them by using the readily available wastewater. She said that this was because rainfall had become increasingly irregular – coming and going when she least expected.

“The kind of crops on this piece of land can grow on any fertile land if it is well watered. But during this period in August, which is supposed to be a very wet time of the year in Yaoundé, very little rainfall has fallen. It makes it impossible for vegetable crops to grow without proper irrigation,” Numfor said.

And Numfor is not the only farmer doing this. Smallholder farmers around the Yaoundé city centre are increasingly farming on urban wastewater sites.

While there are no official figures of how many people are farming in these areas, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER) admitted that the practice was overwhelming.

Smallholder farmers in and around Yaoundé can be seen planting their crops on public land, along railways, in conservation areas, and even near roads.

“This is a long-time practice that has only intensified due to a lot of causes, climate change being one. Many farmers have resorted to urban farming with wastewater,” Collette Ekobo, an agricultural inspector at MINADER, told IPS.

One 45-year-old woman told IPS that she knew 11 other women who cultivated crops on land near wastewater.

“All I know is that the ground is very fertile. I think when people empty their sewers and other household waste into this water, it makes the land very fertile for farming. And there is water all season round,” she said.

Rural-urban migration, aggravated by the adverse effects of climate change on rural farming, is thought to be one of the main reasons behind the growing number of urban farmers in the city.

In 2011, MINADER began warning farmers about the climate variability affecting agriculture across the country. Yaoundé, which is located in Cameroon’s Centre Region, experienced reduced rainfall.

“Over the years in Yaoundé, the rainfall pattern has been so variable and not easy to understand. Rainfall has become very irregular, unpredictable and reduced … this leads to prolonged dryness and the drying up of streams, accompanied by exceedingly hot climatic conditions – all of which provoke poor agricultural performance and low output,” the ministry said.

Ekobo said that because of the changing climate, many farmers found it difficult to predict when to start planting.

“The month of March traditionally marks the start of the planting season in the Centre Region of Cameroon, following the start of the rains. But due to changing rainfall patterns, farmers have now readjusted their planting periods, a phenomenon which is rather difficult to grasp a perfect mastery of. It has caused a lot of confusion with the farmers,” she said.

She added that urban farming was integrated into the urban economic and ecological system of Cameroon.

“The land is rich with urban resources like organic waste, which is used as compost, and urban wastewater, which is used for irrigation. There are also direct links to urban consumers,” Eboko said.

But farming on urban wastewater sites is not a safe practice, according to Foongang Mathias, an agriculture expert at the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development.

“Wastewater irrigation provides the necessary plant nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorous that are required by crops for ample growth. But farming in wastewater poses both health and environmental threats, not only to the urban agriculturalists, but also to the consumers of the crops grown on that field,” he said.

He told IPS that toxic waste from homes, hospitals and industries was probably deposited or carried into the wastewater.

“This water contains pathogenic organisms and disease vectors similar to those in human excreta. Pathogens that are brought in with the wastewater can survive in the soil or on the crop and are responsible for human diseases,” he said.

In addition, according to the World Health Organization: “Available evidence indicates that almost all excreted pathogens can survive in soil for a sufficient length of time to pose potential risks to farm workers.”

Despite the risks to her and her customers’ health, Numfor told IPS that the economic gains from farming in urban wastewater areas far outweighed the dangers.

She will continue to sell her produce to customers, who include restaurant owners and retailers. Numfor said that she earned an average of eight dollars a day, but sometimes made more when she sold her crop to women who export Cameroonian vegetables to the United States and Europe.

At a local market in Obili, a neigbourhood in Yaoundé, stallholders displayed large piles of vegetables that range in price from 200 CFA Francs (50 cents) to 300 CFA Francs (75 cents) per bunch. And consumers here did not care where the produce was grown.

“I totally ignore the fact that they are grown in wastewater because even if they contain germs, the organism cannot survive in the pot with very high temperature,” one woman, who bought three bundles of bitter leaf or Vernonia amygdalina, told IPS.

Another said she felt the vegetables were safe if cooked in hygienic conditions and besides, “no one has ever complained after consuming these vegetables.”

Meanwhile, Eboko said that the government did not plan to regulate farming near wastewater areas.

“Urban wastewater farming is not a regulated activity in Cameroon, although it is an important part of the urban food system. It is not yet considered as a potential problem, but is considered as a subsistence way of life for women.”

A child gets a measles shot at the Jalozai refugee camp. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Aug 14 2012 (IPS)

Measles outbreaks, which have killed at least 100 children in Pakistan’s militancy-hit border areas since May, have prompted calls by experts for better cooperation in territories adjacent to Afghanistan with international immunisation campaigns.

“The latest victims of this paediatric disease are children in the Mohmand Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where nine deaths have been confirmed as a result of non-vaccination,” Dr. Anwar Shah, top health officer in the agency, told IPS.

Measles, a highly infectious disease, produces cough, high fever and distinctive rashes as symptoms.

Shah blamed unsettled conditions caused by Taliban militancy as well as poor public awareness of the value of vaccination for the outbreak of measles in the seven agencies and six border regions that make up the FATA and in adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.   

“My eight-year-old son died of measles last month. He hadn’t been immunised,” Amir Rehman, a farmer in the Lakaro area of Mohmand Agency, told IPS over telephone.

Rehman said he had to take his three surviving children to Charsadda, one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to have them vaccinated against measles.   

In FATA’s North Waziristan, where the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan group banned oral polio vaccination (OPV) in June, an estimated 163,000 children are said to be exposed to poliomyelitis.

The result of the ban on OPV is that the FATA is now the only polio-endemic region in the world that harbours two strains of poliovirus, posing a threat to countries certified polio-free, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) officials.

According to Asghar Ali, a WHO doctor, most of the FATA’s seven agencies have less than 45 percent vaccination coverage against the national target of 95 percent set by the ‘Prime Minister’s Emergency Polio Eradication Plan 2012’.

The situation is worst in the South Waziristan agency where the Taliban has ordered a ban on all vaccinations, leaving the children vulnerable not only to polio but also to measles and other infectious diseases.  

On Jul. 31, South Waziristan’s chief surgeon Azmat Hayat Khan issued a warning that the Taliban’s blanket ban could result in a measles outbreak and more deaths. “The problem is complex because apart from the ban on vaccination there is a shortage of vaccines,” Khan told IPS.

“Measles-affected children need to be admitted to hospital within 24 hours and this is not possible in the tribal areas where people lack transport or resources to move their children to facilities in KP,” Khan said.

Khan said that besides the 100-odd children known to have died of measles since May about 3,000 have been treated in hospitals.

“When unvaccinated children get measles, they need to be rushed to hospitals if they are to survive,” Muhammad Aman, a pediatrician at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar, told IPS.

Dr. Jan Baz Afridi, top immunisation officer in KP, told IPS that additional vaccinators were being deployed in KP districts. “Our staff now visits villages and makes announcements from mosques over loudspeakers to encourage people to get all children up to 15 years of age immunised,” he said.  

Fawad Khan, FATA’s chief health director, said: “Law and order is another problem hampering the government’s effort to promote vaccination. We are looking to the government to ensure security of the health workers to carry out immunisation activities.”  

“Vaccine-preventable ailments do not discriminate between cultures, religions, borders or language,” Michael Coleman, communications specialist with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told IPS. “A small number of unvaccinated children could put at the razor’s edge the lives of thousands of children.”

In April, UNICEF joined WHO and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States in launching a global strategy to reduce measles deaths to zero by 2015.

But the new strategy relies on high vaccination coverage and close monitoring of the spread of measles as well as rubella, using laboratory-backed surveillance and effective communication – grossly lacking in the FATA. 

Studies by the WHO, published in April, showed that accelerated efforts to reduce measles deaths had resulted in a 74 percent reduction in global measles mortality, from an estimated 535,300 deaths in 2000 to 139,300 in 2010.

The WHO study estimated that during the 2000-2010 period, measles vaccine had saved over 9.6 million children.

“Since April, we have immunised 8,000 children against measles in the Jalozai refugee camp (outside Peshawar), where people displaced by military action against the Taliban in FATA are lodged,” WHO’s Dr. Junaid Shah told IPS. “It is much harder to immunise children in the FATA.”  

Shah said that propaganda by the Taliban against oral polio vaccine had not only harmed the immunisation efforts in the FATA but was now proving to be a setback to global efforts to reduce deaths from measles.