The government has decided to take action against the parents refusing polio...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set...
immunisation of their children in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar district, District Coordination Officer Siraj Ahmed Khan told this correspondent on Wednesday.
In civilized countries parents want their children protected from this horrible disease...
He said that the government was taking the rising number of polio cases seriously and it had been decided to initiate action against people who would resist administering oral polio vaccine (OPV) to their children.
"We will use all our options, including getting the services of religious scholars to prevail upon the people, but if that did not work, we will take action against the refusing parents under the law," Mr Khan said and added that parents should vaccinate their children to safeguard them against the crippling ailment.
The DCO also said that people instigating others against the OPV would be locked away under the MPO (Maintenance of Public Order). He said that an Afghan family -- wherein the fourth case in Peshawar district had been registered -- would face deportation as a case would be
registered against them for illegal stay in the country under the 14 Foreigners Act.
He said that the Afghan families were spreading the poliovirus in Peshawar and elsewhere in the province that warranted action. The local families refusing vaccination of their children would also be booked under the 16 and 3 MPO, he said.
Health officials associated with the polio eradication efforts in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central...
told this correspondent that tackling refusals had become a big problem and the government was under tremendous pressure from the United Nations
...a formerly good idea gone bad...
and other donor agencies to cope with the situation.
They said that the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa had recorded seven of the total 80 polio cases in the country this year so far, of which five had not received any OPV due to refusal by their parents.
They said that three of the four polio-affected children in Peshawar district didn't receive any OPV while one each positive child reported from Bannu and Torghar districts also remained unvaccinated.
The officials said that roughly 17,000 children in the province remained without immunization in every campaign due to unwillingness by their parents. They said that Peshawar had over 4,000 children who had not been immunised in the past one year due to refusals.