HEALTH: NEW HAJ RULES TO PUSH POLIO VACCINATION IN INDIA
Ranjita Biswas and Ranjit Devraj
KOLKATA - New polio vaccination rules for Haj (the annual pilgrimage to holy Mecca) announced by the Saudi Arabian government are expected to have a salutary effect on Muslim communities in India, who are otherwise reluctant to get their children immunised, say followers of the faith.
Under the rules, announced this month and to be enforced from January 2006, all children below the age of 15 arriving in Saudi Arabia for the Haj must carry polio immunisation certificates.
''This will send across the right signals to the community,'' Salamat Ullah, a senior banking official and former chairman of the official Haj Committee of India, said in an IPS interview in New Delhi. Of the two million pilgrims who made it to Mecca from around the world in January, at least 130,000 were from India.
A major hurdle in making India polio-free and thereby boost the global effort to eradicate polio has been resistance from pockets of conservative Muslim communities in northern Uttar Pradesh and adjoining Bihar -- states which together have a population of 260 million people.
Uttar Pradesh, which borders the India capital, accounts for more than half of the country's polio burden, and has been seriously hampering an eradication programme that India has been running through mass immunisation since 1995.
Union health ministry officials have blamed the continuing high prevalence, despite mass immunisation efforts, to resistance from Muslim communities in the western Uttar Pradesh districts of Ghaziababd, Badayun, Bulandshahr, Etawah and Moradabad.
''Muslim families in these districts resist immunisation in the mistaken belief that our teams are trying to sterilise young children,'' said a health official who asked not to be named. ''Now that Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Mecca, advocates and even enforces polio immunisation, Muslims here might be better convinced that we are trying to help rather than harm them.''
Ullah said many members of the community have responded well to the Saudi regulations in spite of the extra inconvenience of getting immunisation certificates and that there is now greater confidence in the national programme. ''This is a positive move on the part of Saudi Arabia and I appreciate it,'' he said.
Apart from routine immunisation, India also conducts ''pulse'' immunisation campaigns twice a year that are designed to reach all vulnerable infants on a single day and replace the wild virus (which thrives only in the internal organs of young children) with the weakened one used in the vaccines.
Polio cripples because the virus, which is transmitted through water or food contaminated with faecal matter, attacks the central nervous system, resulting in paralysis or death.
On ''polio days'' some 200 million doses of oral vaccine are administered on a single day by teams that fan out across India during the drives to reach all children in the country under the age of five.
According to Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss, India could save some 250 million U.S. dollars on annual health expenditure if the two major north Indian states alone were to become polio-free.
So far this year, a total of 26 polio cases have been reported from across the country, but of these, 12 were from Uttar Pradesh and ten from Bihar. There was one each reported from Delhi, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal states.
''So many new cases in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh represent a setback for the polio programme,'' admitted Ramadoss, who worked as a medical doctor before he took to politics.
India, Pakistan and Nigeria head the list of countries with most polio cases and are where resistance from Muslim communities to immunisation have been reported. Egypt, Afghanistan, Niger and Somalia are the other countries where the wild polio virus continues to thrive and cripple children.
