Afghanistan: WHO hails Taliban’s decision to launch door-to-door polio vaccination campaign

The United Nations announced to begin a nationwide house-to-house polio vaccination campaign next month in the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan.

Slated to start November 8, the house-to-house campaign will be the country’s first in over three years to reach all children in Afghanistan, according to a news release from UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.

The agency also hailed the new Taliban government for agreeing to lift a ban on such drives.

Taliban military leaders had banned door-to-door visits in 2018, after accusing vaccination teams of acting as spies to gather intelligence for air strikes and special forces raids on Taliban fighters.

This polio campaign synchronized with neighbouring Pakistan’s immunization drive in December, aims at reaching around 10 million children under the age of 5 across the country, including more than 3 million in remote and previously inaccessible areas.

The campaign will be the first in over three years to reach all children in Afghanistan, including more than 3.3 million kids in parts of the country who have “previously remained inaccessible to vaccination campaigns”, Xinhua news agency quoted the statement as saying. “A second nationwide polio vaccination campaign has also been agreed and will be synchronised with Pakistan’s own polio campaign planned in December,” according to the statement.

Multiple doses of the oral vaccine “offer the best protection,” Dapeng Luo, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) representative in Afghanistan, said in the statement. He called the development “an extremely important step in the right direction.”

“This decision will allow us to make a giant stride in the efforts to eradicate polio,” said Hervé Ludovic De Lys, UNICEF’s representative in Afghanistan. “To eliminate polio completely, every child in every household across Afghanistan must be vaccinated, and with our partners, this is what we are setting out to do.”

Polio is a contagious viral illness that can cause paralysis or death in the most serious cases. It affects mainly young children. The virus has been nearly eradicated worldwide in recent decades, and Africa was declared free of wild polio last year — leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan as the only remaining places with the wild virus.

Besides restarting polio vaccination, a supplementary dose of vitamin A will also be provided to children aged 6 to 59 months during the upcoming campaign, the WHO said.