In remote villages and urban slums, an army of experts and committed volunteers is fighting what could be the final battle in an age-old war. The polio eradication campaign is the largest non-military, global enterprise ever. It involves dozens of organisations, scores of governments, thousands of health workers and millions of volunteers. In a world of AIDS, malaria and other health crises, the eradication of polio would demonstrate that humankind can triumph over nature. Since campaigns began in 1996, India has made remarkable progress, reducing polio cases from up to an estimated 100,000 a year to fewer than 70 in 2004, to date (September ’04). The Polio Eradication Partnership (GOI, The World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, Rotary International, along with the US Centers for Disease Control) has set a target to eradicate polio from India by the first half of 2005. However, health workers face major obstacles in defeating the virus once-and-for-all. In a country with a population of over one billion, most of which live in remote villages or heavily congested areas, it is virtually impossible to keep an accurate database of newborn children. Some communities resist polio immunisation, but ultimately it is a lack of funds and patchy commitment that could endanger the success of the mission. The cost of failure would be staggering. If the campaign loses steam and immunisation rates drop, polio could quickly re-emerge and threaten a whole new generation of children, even in places that have long been polio-free.
Agra, November 2003. A disabled boy watches the merriment of other children on the sandy bank of the Yamuna river opposite the Taj Mahal, the most recognized symbol of India worldwide.Agra, November 2003. A disabled boy watches the merriment of other children on the sandy bank of the Yamuna river opposite the Taj Mahal, the most recognized symbol of India worldwide.A volunteer carrying a cold storage box filled with vaccine calls the children at a stone crushing site, to come and be immunized during the ‘door-to-door’ activity near the city of Jodhpur, Rajasthan.Day one of the April 2004 national campaign against polio: volunteers in Jaisalmer, western Rajasthan, are hanging posters of the campaign on the primary health center, PHC, from where the vaccine will be distributed to all the vaccinator teams.A Rajasthani musician on a camel cart adorned with posters of Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous movie star. Singers and musicians like these help motivate health workers and convince parents to have their children immunized.
This ‘social mobilization’ draws on the entire society to promote polio eradication.During the country’s April 2004 NIDs, mothers in the Mohamedan (Muslim) Village Chatrel, in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, wait their turn for their babies to be vaccinated.Some fifteen km’ from the village Khuri in Jaisalmer district, Health workers go ‘door-to-door’ to immunize children. Individual houses are then marked with chalk, indicating that they all have been covered.The ‘door-to-door’ effort to reach all children extends to the country’s railways. A child sitting inside a railway car is vaccinated at Old Delhi station. Vaccination teams board the trains in the station so all children under five who are on board can be immunized.Finger marking is a method enabling the vaccinators to know if the child has received the vaccine or not. The vaccinators had to travel more than three hours on the back of a camel to reach this remote hamlet in the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan.A boy’s fingernail is painted with a permanent marker to indicate he has received his polio vaccination, during a round to vaccinate the children of the workers in the stone mines, some thirty km’ outside the city of Jodhpur in Rajasthan.Assam, May 2004. A vaccination team uses a small boat to reach remote areas on the Brahmaputra flood plain.Street scene in Moradabad (Uttar Pradesh). A woman passing by a wall with posters of latest movies and a promotion poster for the polio campaign, both featuring Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous movie star who endorses the campaign.On the delta area of the Hugli and Ganga rivers in west Bengal, The vaccine is transported to Sagar Island in refrigerated boxes.
