City starts house checks for polio
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Health officials and volunteers are going from house to house to immunize children under five who did not show up to receive the two drops of oral vaccination on Tuesday.
City Health Agency spokesperson Zelvyno said the door-to-door drive would be carried out for a week starting on Wednesday.
"We really do hope that parents will not refuse health workers who visit their homes ... because we want to ensure that the city is free from the wild polio virus," she said.
Agency data showed that 818,581 children under five took part in the massive polio vaccination on Tuesday, or 88 percent of the estimated 923,000 children in the city.
"The participation level in most areas in the city is quite high, although the level was still below May and June levels, which were around 92 percent," she said.
The Thousand Islands regency enjoys the highest percentage of participation with 94.46 percent, followed by East Jakarta with 94.05 percent.
The lowest participation was recorded in North Jakarta with 86.5 percent, followed by Central Jakarta with 88.02 percent.
The agency advised the public to ignore doctors who had told parents not to take their children to get oral polio vaccines because they argued the children had already received enough vaccine.
All children would be well-protected if they received four doses of the vaccine over a certain period, the agency argued.
"Many pediatricians fail to encourage parents to participate in the vaccination drive to free the country from the wild polio virus," agency head Abdul Chalik Masulili said
"What we are afraid of, is that the virus will stay in children who have not received the vaccine and we will remain in danger of a further polio outbreak," he said.
Indonesia had been free of polio for over a decade until the first new case was discovered in early May in Sukabumi, West Java, some 60 kilometers southeast of Jakarta.
By August, polio had claimed eight lives, mostly babies and toddlers, across the country.
The government conducted an initial polio vaccination drive in three provinces -- Jakarta, West Java and Banten -- in May and June, but around 10 percent of the targeted 6.4 million children there were estimated to have missed out.
The first round of the national polio immunization drive was held on Aug. 30, when 92 percent of some 24 million children under five across the country were vaccinated.
Some parents have been reluctant to take their children to vaccination posts due to fears of the medicine's adverse side- effects.
Doubt over the standard of polio vaccine was high after reports by the Legal Aid Institute for Health (LBH Kesehatan) that some children had fallen seriously ill after taking their first vaccination.
These reports were later discredited after the children's illnesses were found to be unrelated to the vaccines.