India’s lessons that finally led to eradicating crippling polio reached Nigeria after it sought India’s expertise recently in combating the virus.
While India was taken off polio endemic list this year after it did not report any polio case, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan have remained to be few countries that are still endemic.
Earlier, experts from India had visited Pakistan after Shahnaz Wazir Ali, the Pakistani Prime Minister’s national focal person on polio eradication led a nine-member delegation to India and asked for India’s help.
Recently, a team of experts from India visited Nigeria to disseminate lessons, especially how it tracked down and reached out to resistant communities, an exercise that finally helped India eradicate
the virus.
Officials in the health ministry disclosed that lessons on micro-planning, how to motivate religious leaders, mapping the habitants where services do not reach, how to zero down on areas, how to motivate communities which are resistant etc were shared with Nigeria.
“We are willing to render our support. Techniqual officers who have worked in difficult areas like Bihar were sent to Nigeria share their experiences. In our country we had mapped 400,000 habitants where services were not reaching. They have a problem of habitation and these experiences will surely help them in combatting the crippling virus to much extent,” said a senior official.
The official said that Nigeria, which made a strong progress in 2010 but slipped backward in 2011, is likely to make progress if they replicate India’s efforts.
“Pakistan has made a huge effort and reorganised the programme after our experts reached out. The same can happen with Nigeria as well,” added the official.
The number of polio cases in India saw a steep fall with only one case reported in 2011, 42 cases in 2010 and 741 in 2009. On the other hand Afghanistan and Pakistan experienced a 220 per cent and 37 per cent increase respectively.
Infact, Nigeria and Pakistan were the only two countries with confirmed circulation of the P3 virus strain since September 2011.
Lauding its efforts the Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio eradicate initiative in its report urged India to deploy its “its expertise in support of other countries like Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan”. Official say that Pakistan emulated India’s surveillance and monitoring system and successfully generated real time data on how many kids are actually missed by vaccinators and how can they be later tracked down and given polio drops.