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.