Polio pointer

About a year ago, the World Health Organisation actually accused India of 8220;exporting polio8221; to other countries. It is a measure of substantial progress the country has made in battling the dreaded disease that today the director of WHO8217;s Global Polio Eradication Initiative has himself acknowledged significant progress. As the Express has just reported, India had only 66 cases of the virulent polio virus type 1 this year, as compared to 575 last year. What was most encouraging was that there has not been a single case of this form of polio being reported from its epicentre in western Uttar Pradesh over the last 11 months.

This is one of the more heartening developments in a year in which it has been officially recognised that India has a higher percentage of malnourished children than sub-Saharan Africa, that an estimated 6.6 million youngsters suffer from iodine deficiency and another 1.5 million, from Vitamin A deficiency. We also know that japanese encephalitis and malaria still continue to take a number of young lives and that tetanus is a huge concern in some states. In fact many child health experts argue that the focus on the polio prevention programme seems to be consuming all the energy of the administrators, and that not enough attention is being paid to other significant health crises that children in this country routinely face.

If this is indeed the case, we need to understand how best we can use the insights gleaned from the polio programme to deliver better child health care. According to those monitoring the polio programme, it is a combination of vaccine use, better operationalisation and greater public awareness that has worked. We need to replicate this model, using both public and private resources, to address the other challenges facing the health and well-being of young India.