Kerala will go along with the national policy and participate in a round of Pulse Polio immunisation drive on Sunday, when 24.5 lakh children below the age of five years in the State will be given oral polio vaccine (OPV) on the same day.
Last year, it was after much deliberations on the polio threat perception particular to the Kerala that the State Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (STAGI), recommended that Kerala need not join the routine Pulse Polio drive.
Migrant workers
Thus last year’s Pulse Polio drive only involved OPV administration to some 25,000 children of migrant labourers in the State.
This year too, STAGI does not believe that the situation has changed. However, it has advised the Health Department to go along with the national policy and to participate in the Pulse Polio drive on Sunday.
“Routine immunisation (RI) continues to be poor across India and even in Kerala, the status of RI is not as good as what we would like it to be. In such circumstances, we cannot discount the fact that our polio-free status could be really under threat because of the circulation of wild polio virus in the neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have thus recommended that we follow the Union Health Ministry’s policy this year year and participate in Pulse Polio campaign. However, we have also reiterated that this PP drive should be used as an opportunity to assess the actual routine immunisation status of our children,” a senior STAGI member told The Hindu.
“Ideally, an intensive campaign is needed to identify all the pockets in the State where the RI is poor and provide injectable Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) to all children. But the distribution and reach of IPV continues to be a problem and even when we are on the verge of polio eradication, we still have a susceptible population,” said K.K. Purushothaman, Head of Paediatrics, Thrissur Government Medical College.
Worrying facts
The flaring up of cases of wild polio virus (Type 1) in Pakistan, the increased circulation of the mutated circulating vaccine-derived polio virus Type 2 in African nations and the reporting of a case of “rare strain of circulating vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV) Type 1” in Malaysia in December 2019 — that too , after a gap of 27 years — are facts which the Union Health Ministry has flagged.
RI status
The current status of RI in Kerala — proportion of fully immunised children — is put at 90.8% .
For the State to confidently decide to do away with Pulse Polio, the RI status has to be at least 95% so that there is absolutely no threat of polio virus (the circulating vaccine-derived polio virus, which is a mutated virus from the OPV itself, appears whenever the immunisation status in the community goes down).
