Polio Eradication

Jacob John has done pioneering service to the children of India by analysing the dogmatic policy stance of the government of India and the states in their misguided approach of tackling Vaccine Preventable Diseases (VPDs), polio in particular (‘Polio Eradication: A National Commission Required’, December 23, 2006).

Those who have observed the health ministry’s attitude right from the 1980s onwards when the child survival programmes were launched, always found among the medical bureaucrats of the ministry a sense of false ego of never agreeing to the proven global epidemiological experience and all the time sticking to the outmoded public health interventions designed by the ministry. When the expanded programme of immunisation (EPI) was turned into the universal immunisation programme (UIP), there were many types of vaccination schedules – some vaccinating only for DPT and polio without BCG at birth and there was no measles vaccination as part of EPI. When international public health specialists told the ministry to include measles the ministry said measles is not the problem in India! It took almost three years to include measles in UIP.