KARACHI, Pakistan — In a rundown district of Karachi, Rabia balks at a neighbor’s proposal to vaccinate her children, demonstrating one of the biggest hurdles to eradicating polio in Pakistan by the end of the year: confused and frightened parents.
Rabia, perplexed and surrounded by children in her modest two-room home, voices fears the vaccine to the crippling disease may in fact cause infertility.
“She was afraid there might be some harmful elements in the vaccine,” says Sharmeen Aslam, neighborhood supervisor of a team of vaccinators.
“I told her there weren’t — and now, since I live here, she knows she can come and see me if there are any problems, so now she believes me.”
Each month, Aslam and her team divide a handful of dusty streets, each going alone to knock at door after ornate door armed with nothing but their anti-polio drops.
She is part of a community vaccination program launched in Pakistan’s biggest city two years ago to ease distrust and suspicion from parents by using staff from their local area.
Pakistan’s anti-polio campaign has long been a dangerous task. One hundred people — both police and health workers — have been killed in attacks targeting polio vaccination campaigns since 2012, including three in Korangi in eastern Karachi in 2014, who were not part of the community program.
The Muslim nation of some 200 million people is one of only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic — the other being war-torn Afghanistan, just over a porous border.
Some Taliban and ultra-conservative religious leaders spread rumors that the vaccine contains ingredients forbidden in Islam, such as pork derivatives, or that can cause infertility as part of a Western plot to reduce the population. Vaccinators are accused of being paid spies, a widespread suspicion which only intensified after the CIA used a fake vaccination campaign to help track down former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in northern Pakistan in 2011.
To dispel doubts, in 2014 the Sindh Emergency Operation Center (EOC), spearheading the fight against polio in Karachi, began hiring local women to take the lead on vaccinations.
“Here, everybody knows me, I do not have to worry about my safety,” says vaccinator Shahnaz Ayaz.
She has worked in other neighborhoods before, she says, but admits she was “a bit afraid.” — AFP
