Misinformation retards polio purge, officials say
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Parents' fears of the side effects of the polio vaccination is increasing the risk of exposing their infants to polio, officials say, thus allowing the virus to spread within the country and beyond, particularly in the rainy season.
The nationwide immunization drive scheduled for Aug. 30 and Sept. 22 is in the global spotlight as experts are betting on it to contain the spread of the disease.
In the previous vaccination round in late June, the first being in May, Minister of Health Siti Fadilah Supari said that she "lost" 700,000 infants under five who did not get their mandatory second polio vaccination because parents were afraid of harmful effects.
In a meeting with editors on Friday, she blamed misleading coverage of a child who died after being vaccinated, which led parents to fear their children becoming sick or dying after being vaccinated against polio. The June rounds targeted more than six million children.
"It is these children who will fall victim" if parents continue to resist vaccination, the minister added.
A visiting official from the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) working on the worldwide campaign against polio said that Unicef reports confirmed that the death of the child had nothing to do with the administration of the polio vaccine.
Claire Hajaj of the Unicef headquarters in New York said the next immunization drive provided "a window of opportunity" to rid Indonesia and the world of polio.
In an earlier drive in West Africa she said "civil wars were stopped" once the campaign against polio was launched, as vaccines were transported across the region.
Children in Indonesia, Hajaj said, are at "a most vulnerable point" regarding polio, citing three reasons. First, parents have been frightened by coverage of the adverse effects of polio vaccinations. "So in the middle of an outbreak many children did not get polio vaccinations," Hajaj said.
Besides, she added, a lot of children have not been give routine immunization in pockets across the country. A breakdown of community and neighborhood health systems have been blamed for the return of ailments such as polio and malnutrition in the last few years.
The third reason for the current vulnerability of children to polio, Hajaj said, was because of the upcoming peak of the rainy season, when the virus spreads faster. "Infants play in the dirt, they put their hands in their mouths ...," she related.
She said that when she visited areas with health officials last week, many parents refused to have their toddlers vaccinated. "It was frustrating to see mothers clinging to their children; there is no cure for polio, but we have the vaccine!"
The vaccine, she said, has since 1988 saved five million children "who would otherwise be paralyzed".
In 1988, 1,000 children contracted polio every day, she added, compared to only 1,000 a year since 2004.
All infants under five need not only routine polio vaccinations but also the protection of immunization drives, Hajaj said.