Govt reiterates vaccine's importance
Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
As nearly 800,000 babies were not immunized against polio in the first mass vaccination, the government has urged wary parents to participate in the next mass vaccination to be given in August and September.
Minister of Health Siti Fadilah Supari said on Friday that people need not to worry over the safety of the polio vaccine.
"Don't hesitate to bring your children. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said the polio virus here is malignant so we have to halt its spread," Siti said.
According to the ministry, 6,548,515 babies were immunized during the first stage of the May 31 mass vaccination carried out in three provinces: Jakarta, West Java and Banten.
The second dose of the vaccine was given on June 28, however, attendance dropped by 12 percent to 5,756,046 babies, or just 91.5 percent of first-stage attendance.
The decline was probably a reaction to the death of a nine- month-old girl six days after her first dose of polio vaccine on May 31. Her parents filed a law suit against the government, but a link between the baby's death and the vaccine has not been proved.
WHO's senior advisor David Heymann said the media needed to be responsible in its coverage, and convince people the vaccine is safe.
"The polio virus spreading here is malignant and the attack rate is high. The virus will always seek a weak point, it will attack the population that cannot maintain a protection level and has a low prevention rate," he said.
In the next mass vaccination, targeting 24.3 million infants across the country, the first dose will be given on Aug. 30 and the second on Sept. 27.
Siti said the government had coordinated with foreign agencies including WHO, UNICEF and Rotary International, regarding vaccine availability, operational cost, epidemiology surveillance and social mobilization.
The number of doses of polio vaccine needed is 69,770,440, with 71.3 percent or around 49 million doses to be provided by government-owned pharmaceutical firm PT Bio Farma, and the rest to be provided by donor agencies.
The total budget for the upcoming vaccination weeks is around Rp 230 billion (US$24.21 million), with some Rp 100 billion to be financed through the State Budget, and the rest from donor agencies.
Up until July 7, the ministry recorded 259 cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP), with 122 of those cases diagnosed as polio. The cases occurred in nine regencies: four regencies in West Java, three in Banten, one in Central Java and one in Lampung -- the first case to occur in Sumatra in a decade.
The first case to appear in Indonesia since 1996 was detected in April of this year in Sukabumi, West Java -- a densely populated town closed to the capital Jakarta.
Polio sometimes causes paralysis and it can kill people. It is believed the virus returned to Indonesia via Saudi Arabia, either through migrant workers or Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, who may have passed on a strain of the virus originating in Nigeria.