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Mahesh

25/10/24 11:42 AM IST

World Polio Day

In News
  • October 24 is observed as World Polio Day.
  • The Day was established by Rotary International to commemorate the birth of Jonas Salk, who led the first team to develop the vaccine against the disease in the 1950s.
Vaccination against Polio
  • Vaccination against polio began in 1972, and expanded in 1985 as the country-wide Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP).
  • For polio, one immunisation day would be fixed for the whole country and awareness created about it.
  • The fact that polio drops could be given orally and not as an injection was an advantage, as local health workers could administer them even without special training.
  • Vaccination drives would be held on festivals, at railway stations, and any place where a large number of people gathered.
  • The polio vaccination tagline — do boond zindagi ki (two drops of life) — still has recall value
  • Polio often spreads through the feces of the infected person, which others can come in contact with from contaminated food and water, poor hygiene, etc.
  • Thus, along with vaccination, the importance of washing hands, boiling drinking water, giving only breastmilk to babies below six months of age, etc. was also communicated to people.
  • The efforts were led by the Centre and state governments, supported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF, US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rotary International, and donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • By 2008, cases had begun to decline in many parts of the country.
  • According to a UNICEF report, “In 2009, the polio partners found that more than 80 per cent of polio cases were persistently occurring in just 107 blocks of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.”
Monitoring
  • A cornerstone of the strategy was effective surveillance and monitoring of high-risk groups.
  • According to a research paper by Toronto-based Reach Alliance, “Availing itself of the expertise of the World Health Organization (WHO), India developed a robust surveillance system.
  • Without this multilayered surveillance system, cases of polio among the hardest-to-reach groups were being missed, leading to continued transmission.”
  • This involved monitoring the occurrence of acute flaccid paralysis in children, which is often caused by the polio virus, and then immunising those around the affected child.
  • For this, a network of ‘informers’ was built, including community health workers, local residents, doctors, faith healers etc.
Special strategy for migrants
  • A big problem in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar was seasonal migration for work, which meant a set of people fell through monitoring cracks.
  • To cover migrants, vaccination drives were conducted at their residential camps.
  • Daily wage workers did not want to miss a day’s earnings in taking their kids for immunisation, so vaccination camps were organised keeping in mind their work timings.
  • Vaccine hesitancy stemmed from rumours that it could make children impotent. The Muslim community had religious objections.
  • For this, community leaders like imams and maulanas were roped in.
  • Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia also made awareness efforts.
  • “For example, one rumour was that the OPV was manufactured using pig blood which is deemed to be haram or forbidden in Muslim culture.
  • To dispel this, influential Islamic leaders issued a fatwa (a ruling in Islamic law) to confirm that the OPV was halal,
Source- Indian Express

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