Parents, children roll up for polio vaccination

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Celebrities and popular Muslim clerics made appearances at immunization posts to ease fears about the safety of the polio vaccine as the massive drive started on Tuesday with a target of vaccinating 24 million children.

More than 750,000 health workers have fanned out across the country to 245,000 posts in health clinics, bus depots, train stations and airports. The second round is scheduled for Sept. 27.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's wife Kristiani Herawaty Yudhoyono launched the drive, amid balloons, cakes and crying children. She personally administered the oral vaccine drops to children at a makeshift health center in a poor neighborhood in the Gunung Sahari area of Central Jakarta.

"People should not be afraid," she said in the crowded clinic. "We are doing this for the sake of the children, for the sake of the next generation."

The waterborne polio virus, which has infected 226 children since March, reemerged in the country after nearly a decade after its eradication. Two UN-supported vaccination rounds were launched in May and June, right after the first cases in western Java here were reported, initially targeting 6.5 million children.

Although the first round was hailed a success, the second round was dogged by rumors that three children had died from taking the vaccine, and so only 5.5 million children turned up the second time. Those three deaths were later attributed to other causes, but parents and health workers were spooked.

In Papua province, many mothers turned up with their children at the posts as early as 8 a.m. on Tuesday in the drive, with a target to vaccinate 286,151 children in the province's 13 regencies.

"Come on, it's OK," Emilda persuaded her three-year-old daughter Sela in a crowded clinic in the Kotaraja area of Jayapura. She finally took the drops but continued to cry.

Despite the all-out public relations efforts for the US$24 million drive and the country's largest-ever public health campaign, some people living in remote areas and disaster- affected regions missed the event.

In tsunami-ravaged Aceh, 13-year-old Salawati, who had to drop out of school and assume her mother's role in the family after the disaster, was too busy cooking to take her brother, Muhammad Iswandi, 3, to the health post. Their father was working.

But Muhammad did not miss his vaccination because health workers assigned to the Lambaro Siron barracks for tsunami victims in Aceh Besar regency went door-to-door to ensure all children were vaccinated. "This method is effective, quick and we will not miss any children," said Nana, a health worker.

Some mothers, however, were still reluctant to take toddlers to the immunization posts.

Reni, a Muararajeun Lama resident in Bandung, did not take her children to the post and did not allow visiting health workers to vaccinate them, claiming her children all had received the vaccine twice in the previous drive in May and June.

Many mothers in Kebonkawung hamlet in Plered, Purwakarta still expressed fear after nine-month-old Riri Agustini died five days after being vaccinated in May. On Tuesday, from some 181 children registered in two posts in the hamlet, only about 10 percent of them showed up.

Head of West Java's Environmental Health Office subdivision, Fatimah Resmiati, blamed the fears on many factors, but particularly factually misleading reports in the mass media.

This time around, she added, nine experts were sent to polio- prone areas like Cianjur, Cirebon, Garut and Sukabumi to ensure that the target of vaccinating 4.5 million children in the province could be met.