We will have no problems eradicating polio – Rotary

Of what relevance is the national immunization day to Nigeria?National Immunisation Day (NID) falls under the category of what we call supplemental immunisation activities.  We have routine immunisation schedules because when a child is born, they are given vaccination at birth and one of them is polio, BC. Afterwards we wait for three months, then […]

Of what relevance is the national immunization day to Nigeria?
National Immunisation Day (NID) falls under the category of what we call supplemental immunisation activities.  We have routine immunisation schedules because when a child is born, they are given vaccination at birth and one of them is polio, BC. Afterwards we wait for three months, then the child is given another vaccine and at nine months another and at 18 months they are given pre -school which is the normal way of administering vaccination to children.
This is what we call routine immunisation but what we find is that there is a huge population of un-immunised children that is why we need to do supplementary immunization.
This means that apart from the routine immunisation, we need to target those children who are not actually getting the routine immunisation.
The next NID is from Saturday 14th to Tuesday, 17th of March, 2015. However in the southern states there has been no polio case recorded, and the state which has not witnessed any polio for over 14 years is Akwa Ibom. Lagos has not had polio for about  four years now.
As long as there is a child in the world who still has polio or the virus is harboured somewhere, then no child is safe because of that one virus.
We encourage people to vaccinate their children because the polio vaccine is very safe and once you do that you are increasing the chances of your child being protected against poliomyelitis. We have the team in every locality and every house is enumerated, we have what is called a micro plan and every house in Lagos State for instance is on the map and vaccinators are assigned to specific areas.
In high risk states, we deployed a modern technology known as the  GPRS which helps to tell whether  a vaccination team has gone to a house or not from a central location called the emergency operation centre.
Equipped with GPRS chips they carry around, anytime they go to a location the GPRS will turn green from red on the monitor. So if at the end of the day, they come back to say they have covered certain areas and the red is on the GPRS, we tell them they are lying because there are still a lot of red in the areas they are supposed to cover.

How has Rotary International been working with the Federal Government in fighting polio in Nigeria?
The fight against polio is a team effort, the immunisation exercise in Nigeria is run by a taskforce now which was set up by the federal government in April 2013. All agencies involved in fighting polio were brought together under this platform.
These agencies will naturally be the government at the federal level, state and local government levels then partners who are the WHO, UNICEF, Rotary International, Centre For Diseases Control,  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who is massively funding polio programme in Nigeria, the Dangote Foundation, among others.
We all work under one umbrella called the emergency operation centre for polio. We have one headquarters in Abuja with offices located in seven of the most difficult states in terms of our efforts to eradicate polio which are Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Bauchi and two other states. So, all those partners involved in polio issues meet there regularly to strategize with the department.
Fighting polio is a combined effort, some agencies  bring funds, others  human resources and advocacy to get government to do what they are supposed to do at the right time.  

Why is the GPRS restricted to only high risk states and not deployed during the national exercise?
We have gotten immunisation to a level where most children are safe especially in the south east, south south, south western states most of the middle belt as a matter of fact some northern states have not seen  polio in a long time. So the immunity of the children is very high, a lot of the states in the south east, south south and south west have reached a level where even if polio comes to such environment, it doesn’t find a route to infect children. We don’t have much rejections partially because of the level of education and information so there is no need for us to deploy much technology.

Any plans on how to tackle the high risk states?
That is the beauty of our partnership, each time we have immunisation day we encounter challenges and we come to the drawing board and ask ourselves how do we surmount those challenges? In security comprised areas, there are quite a few innovations put in place.
One of those is hit and run by meeting regularly with security operatives in those areas and they tell us which local government is free and guarantee us of safety. So for two to three days we have a permanent health teams which are groups of vaccinators just waiting once they declare that they can go in, they go in.
We normally have 10 teams but we send 20teams because the work that needs to be done in four days will be done in two days because we have doubled the number of teams. Those are hit and run kinds of teams we use, we also secure areas that are already immunised in other words, we  do what we call ‘fire walling’. So, boundaries between local government that are transmitting polio and those that have stopped have permanent health teams. Children below five years of age going in and out of those local government will get polio dropped into their mouths, going from immunised to non immunised they get polio dropped. We also do that in our boundaries between Niger and Cameroon so that all transit points along those border are covered.