New York: UNICEF has said that a recent report on 'never vaccinated children' is a call to make polio a history.
In a statement issued to the press, organisation’s Executive Director Anthony Lake said, “The Independent Monitoring Board on progress with global polio eradication reports the significant finding that 2.7 million children in six countries have never been reached with a single polio vaccine. This is a clarion call to accelerate all efforts to reach these unreached children.”
Lake said that not only these millions of children never had a polio vaccine but many of these ‘never’ children have not been reached by the life-saving benefits of routine immunization.
He pointed out that the report calls on everybody to help find and vaccinate these children, make every encounter with these children count and make history by wiping out this crippling disease.
“As many of these ‘never’ children live in volatile areas of conflict such as eastern parts of eastern DR Congo, Borno in northern Nigeria, the Northwest region of Pakistan, humanitarian space must always be protected and preserved so that the heroes of the polio campaigns – the volunteers, the vaccinators and the social mobilizers – can have full access to children. This is especially the case in a global campaign like the fight against polio," Lake added.
He stated that he polio campaign is "dangerously under-funded."
"But we are on the verge of victory. Not only can we make history by succeeding in eradicating polio but we will be condemned by history if we fail. UNICEF is committed, with partners, to implementing the recommendations outlined in the report such as using polio vaccination campaigns for integrated public health campaigns around good sanitation and nutrition, scaling up use of social mobilization activities so communities take ownership of the health campaigns and finding innovative ways of reaching missed children,” Lake concluded.