Supervision and monitoring of polio weakening: Review
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The latest review on Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) surveillance, a process that forms part of the effort to eradicate polio, showed that supervision and monitoring of the disease in Indonesia has weakened this year.
The current AFP case detection rates for non-polio AFP during the first five months of this year were below one. The AFP minimum rate is one case per every 100,000 children under 15 years old. A lower rate than the minimum means the possibility of the polio virus being present in a country.
Minister of Health Achmad Sujudi said on Friday that the evaluation would describe the effectiveness of AFP surveillance, a process that is designed to make sure that no single case of AFP -- whether caused by the polio virus or otherwise -- escapes detection.
He said that the reasons behind the decline were, among other things, the impact of the financial crisis, changes in the government system and the replacement of medical officers.
"We ran out of money in January but we only received additional funding after May. Such (financial) delays are obviously an obstacle for us," Sujudi said.
In general, Indonesia has been moving to eradicate polio through the National Immunization Week campaigns held in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2002.
The country also has three of the 145 polio laboratories worldwide. These are located in Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung. The three laboratories are capable of virus isolation and serotyping. They have also been accredited by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1998, said the WHO's global coordinator of the polio laboratory network, Esther de Gourville.
The Southeast Asian region countries, including India, plan to have WHO polio-free certification by 2005. To reach this goal, each country must be declared polio-free first, said the WHO regional advisor on immunization and vaccine development (polio), Arun Thapa.
"It is only three years after the last country in the region is declared polio-free that certification for the region will be obtained," he said, "But the process of certification for the Southeast Asia region has actually started already."
Indonesia was declared polio-free in 1995. India is the only country in the region where polio is still endemic.