Polio and ignorance

With so much bad news around us we often strive to be cautious optimists. Take the national polio immunization week; should we be optimistic about the vaccinations reaching nearly 90 percent of the country's children as of Thursday, a day before the end of the week? Unfortunately not.

Experts tell us that skipping one single child among the targeted 24 million under five years in the nationwide drive, means exposing not only that child to polio, but others beyond the more than 200 children in Indonesia who are already infected, and even beyond the nation's borders.

This immunization week was the first to be done on a nationwide scale, but it was not the only time an immunization drive has been done; mass vaccinations meant to halt polio by targeting the affected areas -- Jakarta, Banten and West Java provinces -- in May have sadly proven unsuccessful as the number of cases has mushroomed and moved to Sumatra island and other provinces on Java.

Alarmed authorities were notified about this new outbreak of polio in Sukabumi, West Java, the first known case since the nation was declared polio-free in 1995. Indonesia is now part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which earlier focused on six remaining countries, including Nigeria, Pakistan and India.

But even with the benefit of experience from the May rounds, we saw with dismay, though not with much surprise, the repetition of the flaws in the earlier round. A number of parents continued to resist vaccinations for their children, as shown by the low turnout in some vaccination posts, ostensibly because they feared that their children would become sick or die from the vaccine. This fear, however, was dismissed by health authorities, who blamed it largely on unprofessional media coverage.

We do not yet know if the ones that did not take part in the drive have already seen private pediatricians for the vaccination.

Even more alarming has been the conflicting views of health workers in the field, which has contributed even further to the no-show rate. Some newspapers and TV stations have reported that polio post workers were turning away children who had a mild fever or a cold, saying they should be vaccinated another time. Meanwhile, other health officials referred to the manuals, and decided that there were only a few exceptions to giving the oral vaccine (seriously ill children and those with problems with their immune system). Some pediatricians reportedly have been telling parents that getting vaccinated in the nationwide drive was not mandatory if their infants already had the standard package of immunizations.

This all points to the stark reality that the information campaign has been far from adequate. What has not come across in an equally strong way is that there is no cure from this merciless virus, which paralyzes in a matter of hours; that there is an outbreak going on, right here, right now; that the virus will spread much easier during the upcoming rainy season; and that this country has much lower standards of sanitation compared to people in other countries where citizens can safely say, "my child is safe, she has had the polio vaccinations already."

For parents here, there has not been enough convincing information; information that makes it crystal clear that they are exposing their child to the very real possibility of he or she waking up paralyzed tomorrow morning, if they fail to get children vaccinated during this outbreak. The lingering question that remains in parents' minds despite assurances from the World Health Organization and our own health ministry is, "what if the reports were true, that a child died because of the vaccine?"

On Sept. 27, the next round of this drive will take place and it remains a big question as to whether we will have been able to overcome the main obstacles -- ignorance and confusion -- in reaching every single child. The media, quite obviously, must ensure that every report has clear facts and verifies all information from only credible sources. Authorities are relying on the mass media to pass on the message that every single child needs to be immunized in the next two nationwide rounds -- the other is in early November -- even if a child has already received the vaccination in the latest round.

There is little time left to ensure, in the words of the WHO, that no child should ever again experience the crippling effects of polio.