Millions Immunized Against Polio in Bangladesh

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (OneWorld.net) - With hopes of eradicating polio in Bangladesh, health agencies have immunized 22 million children against the disease.

• A six-month old boy is vaccinated against polio on 29 November. © IRINAfter a five-year absence, polio re-emerged in Bangladesh in 2006. The subsequent drive to eradicate the illness "has been one of the best examples of a nation standing as one to immunize its children against the disease. The central challenge now is to sustain the momentum. For as long as one transmitter of polio virus remains anywhere, all children will be at risk - and until that last child is reached, the task is not completed," states Louis Georges Arsenault, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative in Bangladesh.
  

• The World Health Organization set out to eliminate polio, an infectious waterborne disease, worldwide in 1988. Since then, the global incidence of polio has fallen by 99 percent. Polio remains endemic in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan and a number of once polio-free nations have experienced re-infection. For more information, see the Global Polio Eradication Initiative's 2007 annual report.

• Despite shortcomings in quality of staff and treatment for the poorest sectors of society, key health indicators in Bangladesh, such as child and maternal mortality rates, indicate significant improvement since 1990. A key contributor to the country's health status will be the dramatic advance in access to safe sanitation, an important aspect of polio prevention as the disease can spread rapidly through human faeces. Defying gloomy progress reports elsewhere in the world, Bangladesh claims to be close to achieving a target of universal sanitation by 2010. Read more about health, development, and human rights in OneWorld UK's Bangladesh country guide.

BANGLADESH: Some 22 million children immunised against polio

From: IRIN

DHAKA, 1 December 2008 (IRIN) - Health experts in Bangladesh have successfully immunised 22 million under-five children against polio, a debilitating disease that mainly strikes children.

"We hope we will be able to make Bangladesh polio-free by 2011," Salma Begum, a local field worker told IRIN in a suburb of Dhaka, adding that there had not been a single case of polio in the country since November 2006.

Field workers from the government's health and family planning department, along with 600,000 volunteers administered the oral polio vaccines (OPVs) to children on 29 November at 140,000 sites across the country, followed by a four-day house-to-house search to ensure that no child was left out.

"When the immunisation team visited our slum, I took my two younger brothers to them to receive the drops and capsules," said seven-year-old Shapla Khatun of the Shekher Tek slum in Dhaka's Mohammadpur area. Shapla's father is a rickshaw puller. Her mother works as a domestic help.

About 22 million under-fives, or about 97 percent of that age group, were immunised against polio, as part of Bangladesh's current (17th) national immunisation day (NID), with each one receiving two drops of OPV and a vitamin A capsule as part of the first round of the campaign.

Vitamin A is given to children to bolster their immune system against diseases such as measles, diarrhoea and night blindness.

Coverage of vitamin A supplementation increased from around 50 percent in the mid-1990s to above 95 percent in recent years, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The government of Bangladesh, with support from UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), carried out the campaign.

Re-emergence of polio

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

Children under five years of age are particularly susceptible

Polio (poliomyelitis) is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system, and can cause paralysis or even death within hours, say health experts.

The polio virus enters the body through the mouth, or in water or food that has been contaminated with faecal material from an infected person. The disease mainly affects younger children, but in rare instances, can affect older children as well.

Bangladesh launched the drive to immunise all under-five children when, after a lapse of five years, a case of polio was detected in March 2006.

Eighteen polio cases were thereafter detected in 12 districts across all divisions of Bangladesh, with the last one reported on 22 November 2006, according to UNICEF.

Since the 2006 detection, there have been six polio NIDs in 2006 and four in 2007. In each case 95-98.2 percent of under-five children were immunised.

With support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Micronutrient Initiative, UNICEF and WHO, the government of Bangladesh added vitamin A capsules which were dispensed with OPV during this latest NID.

Beyond polio

"The current NID round is sure to go much beyond containing the recurrence of polio alone," said Carel de Rooy, UNICEF representative in Bangladesh.

"By combining OPV and vitamin A supplementation, the NID campaign will be able to reduce a host of other illnesses like measles, diarrhoea and night blindness that pose threats to the lives of children in Bangladesh," he said.

Measles and diarrhoea contribute to over 25 percent of deaths among children aged 1-5 in Bangladesh, UNICEF has reported.

The annual number of under-five deaths per 1,000 live births was 69 in 2006.

"Bangladesh is again a polio-free country since 2006, but the threat of recurrence of the virus still exists. We need to sustain our achievements made during the previous NIDs, along with the routine EPI [Expanded Programme on Immunisation] coverage, particularly in hard-to-reach areas," said Duangvadee Sungkhobol, WHO representative in Bangladesh.