Govt to boost antipolio campaign

Govt to boost antipolio campaign

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

The government has vowed to become more aggressive in conducting
its polio vaccination campaign targeted at millions of under-
fives.

Minister of Health Siti Fadhilah Supari said on Thursday that
the government would carry out a door-to-door vaccination
campaign until Monday.

"For the next five days, we will focus on areas where we have
failed to meet the target. We'll be even more aggressive in the
second round," she said before a Cabinet meeting at the
Presidential Office.

The second round of the campaign will start on Sept. 27.

The minister said that health workers managed to reach the
targets in some important areas such as East Nusa Tenggara,
although they faced problems in other areas, such as West
Kalimantan.

Siti said that the government's polio vaccination campaign had
reached some 80 percent of the 23.4 million under-fives across
the country. This figure was based on reports submitted by health
workers in 29 provinces, while reports from four other provinces
had not been submitted yet.

"The final figure will be available after an evaluation is
carried out next week," she said.

The government has deployed more than 750,000 health workers
across the country to vaccinate children against the virus -- a
crucial step to halting the spread of the disease both here and
around the region.

Although Indonesia was declared free of polio in 1995, the
waterborne polio virus reemerged here in April this year with
three under-fives being diagnosed with the disease in West Java.

Polio, which is believed to have been brought back here from
Nigeria, has now crippled 226 victims in 108 villages in Central
and West Java, Banten, Lampung and Jakarta.

The country is the 16th to be reinfected after an outbreak in
Nigeria.

Two United Nations-sponsored vaccination rounds were launched
soon after the first cases emerged, initially targeting 6.5
million children. The first round was hailed as a success but it
was plagued by rumors that three children had died from taking
the vaccine. Their deaths were later attributed to other causes.
Only 5.5 million of the 6.5 million children turned up for the
second round.

Polio spreads when unvaccinated people come into contact with
the feces of those with the virus, often through contaminated
water in places with poor hygiene or inadequate sewage systems.

It attacks the nervous system in young children, causing
paralysis, muscular atrophy and sometimes death. Only about one
in 200 of those infected ever develops symptoms.

The effort to curb polio here is being closely watched by
other countries in Asia, who fear that the virus could
eventually spread to the region if Indonesia fails to stamp it
out.