FIGHTING DISEASE Health workers give polio vaccine to a child whose family lives in a shelter for people displaced by the 2017 siege in Marawi City. FROILAN GALLARDO
MARAWI CITY—The health ministry in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) has welcomed the support extended by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to the effort to eradicate polio in Lanao del Sur province, where the government expects to vaccinate close to 170,000 children under 5 years old.
Dr. Saffrullah Dipatuan, BARMM health minister, said the MILF had ordered its field commanders to ensure that the region’s health personnel would be welcomed in their camps as they came to vaccinate children of former combatants.
According to Dipatuan, the MILF support will be significant in helping expand the vaccination coverage.
Lanao del Sur has one confirmed polio case—a 3-year-old girl in Marogong town.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said Lanao del Sur had posted a low 60-percent penetration rate of vaccination.
“This is not high enough to ensure the children in Lanao del Sur are protected against polio and other diseases,” he said.
Duque and representatives of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) launched here on Monday the “Sabayang Patak Kontra Polio.”
Religious leaders’ help
Oyun Dendevnorov, Unicef Philippines representative, said the agency was helping the campaign in Lanao del Sur by tapping the support of religious leaders, or “ulama.”
Dendevnorov said interest on vaccination could be propped up through the religious leaders’ sermons, which she said carried a lot of influence on local families.
Duque said the children in Lanao del Sur were vulnerable, citing a Department of Health study in 2007 that showed that only 10 of 100 houses in the province had toilets.
Lanao del Sur Board Member Abdulhamid Amerbitor said one of the reasons for the poor acceptance of vaccination among Maranao parents was the fear that vaccines might cause sickness among their children.
Another reason Amerbitor cited was the wrong notion among parents that vaccines did not pass halal standards.
Scare
“We have to go house to house to dispel these beliefs. It is very tiring,” he said.
Amerbitor said reports about the 3-year-old girl from Marogong town contracting polio scared most parents.
“Maybe they will allow their children to be vaccinated this time because it is not easy to have a sick child in the family,” he said.
Dr. Alinader Minalang, Lanao del Sur provincial health officer, said tests conducted along Marogong River, near where the child’s family lives, turned out negative for the virus causing polio.
The family used to live in Quiapo, Manila, leading health officials to suspect that the girl contracted the disease there. The family returned to Marogong in 2017.
Minalang said the girl’s parents could not produce any record to show that the child received polio vaccine in Manila.