Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has warned that children in southern Kandahar and Helmand provinces are facing a serious polio endemic with vaccination drives suspended due to security threats.
Sixty five percent of all polio cases in Afghanistan are found in the south of the country, especially in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The World Health Orgainsation (WHO) has marked seven districts of Kandahar and four districts of Helmand as insecure.
The governor of Kandahar’s Meianshin district said that the polio vaccination staff cannot operate in “dangerous areas”. He said that “in the most insecure parts we don’t have any access and the vaccination staff cannot go there. The Taliban have planted mines and it is very dangerous”.
However he admitted that it is not merely security that is presenting problems to the vaccination drive. He said “administrative challenges, lack of supervision, lack of coordination and mostly insecurity are the really big challenges hampering vaccinations” .
According to the MoPH statistics, there are 8.2 million children under 5 years old living in Afghanistan. Of these, 1.3 million live in the south. Afghanistan is third country in the world for polio risk after Pakistan and Nigeria, although the incidence is dropping. There were 80 cases of polio in 2011 and 37 cases in 2012
