Excerpt: “There are people at the highest level [of the government] who’ve told me they start their day with polio, they end their day with polio, as if this is the only priority,” says Zulfiqar Bhutta, a professor of pediatrics at the Aga Khan University in Karachi. Bhutta has worked on polio for decades.
Polio eradication is very important, he says. But it’s unclear how long Pakistan can stay focused on mass immunization drives. “What we need to go and try to do is something a bit more holistic,” he says, “rather than trying to focus on a single intervention and a single program that bears very little relevance to the lives and livelihoods of people.”
Pakistan should work to improve its basic health services, Bhutta says, so kids get immunized for polio along with everything else; and sanitation should be upgraded so the polio virus can’t contaminate drinking water.
But projects like those take even more time and more resources than the current barrage of polio immunization campaigns.
via http://www.gpb.org.
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