Immunizing our children

Today is National Immunization Day in India, and even as the entire health machinery across the country has been geared up to cover every child, the fact remains that there is still a long way to go to ensure that every single child is immunized. Routine Immunization is a nation’s strategic investment in its future. India’s routine immunization programme is a dynamic one and has over the years evolved to address the changing public health needs of the country. Notwithstanding the fact that there is a long way to go to achieve 100 per cent immunization, tremendous gains have been made in immunization coverage in a country where challenges reflect accessibility, acceptability and availability issues. India had made a record of sorts way back in 1975 when it eradicated smallpox altogether, while polio eradication was achieved in 2014. It is interesting to recall that India had over 86% of the world’s smallpox cases in 1974, primarily due to an epidemic which broke out that year. By January 1975, an operation was started aimed at containing the last cases of smallpox. This operation was code-named “Target Zero”, with the identification of the last smallpox patient in India occurring on May 24, 1975. It should be of interest to our readers that the last smallpox case in India was reported in Karimganj, with the patient identified as Saiban Bibi.

The patient had travelled to India by illegally crossing the international boundary from Bangladesh while incubating the disease after having caught the infection in Sylhet district. The 30-year-old Bangladeshi woman was found lying in a railway station in Karimganj, and was removed to the Karimganj Civil Hospital by field health workers after she lay writhing in fever and pain in the railway station for six days. While treatment began and finally survived, the authorities had carried out a rapid immunization operation covering over 22,000 people in the Karimanj and the adjoining areas. Interestingly, while Saiban Bibi recovered, there were no further cases despite the fact that she must have come in contact with a large number of people. The last reported case of wild polio in India on the other hand was in Howrah in West Bengal, not far away from Kolkata, in January 2011. The patient was Rukhsar Khatun, a two-year-old girl. Notably, while her two siblings had received polio vaccinations, Rukhsar’s parents had thought it was safer for her to avoid the vaccine because she was often sick with diarrhoea. Looking at the overall picture, reports quoting national health data say that nearly 47% of India’s poorest children are not fully immunized, 17 percentage points more than the richest children, leaving them prone to preventable disease and their households susceptible to catastrophic health expenditure. Government immunization programmes have been carried out for 30 years in India.

Yet, immunization coverage has grown only at the rate of 1 percentage point per year. The biggest reason for low coverage is lack of awareness about the benefits of immunization, a fact admitted by the Union government in Parliament. Other reasons include side effects immediately after vaccination (such as a fever), misinformation about vaccines, migration of families, refusal to get vaccinated and shortcomings in implementation of the scheme. It is against this backdrop that India has been observing National Immunization Day across the country on January 19, with the government of India setting out to give to drops of oral polio vaccine to every child between 0 and 5 years irrespective of their previous immunization status. In Assam, the Government has set a target of reaching out to exactly 47,27,225 under-5 children across the state on Sunday. This will be followed by a house-to-house mopping up campaign on Monday and Tuesday in order to find out if any child has been left out. In fact, while the Government agencies are carrying out the immunization programme, it is the sacred duty and responsibility of every right-thinking citizen to spread the message to every family, every parent. Immunization after all is one of the safest and most effective methods of preventing childhood diseases. Investing in children is the best investment for every family.