With one virus not eliminated, another threatens. Pakistan is drawing international attention because it is one of the last two countries where children are still being infected by the polio virus. While the number of infections has gone down, they have not been eliminated. Prime Minister Ahehbaz Sharif has assured a delegation of the Bill Gates Foundation, headed by its President for Global Development, that Pakistan is dedicated to the elimination of the dread disease. Polio elimination is one of the causes by which the Foundation defines itself, with the delivery of vaccines to Pakistan one of its major activities. Mr Sharif told the delegation that 140 million children had been vaccinated so far, and that the federal and provincial governments were successfully coordinating to ensure that vaccination teams were given adequate protection.
Even as they spoke, the country’s Border Protection Service moved to impose strict screening at all arriving passengers and crew entering the country from abroad, for the Nipah virus, after two cases were confirmed in West Bengal. The virus had a fatality rate of 73 percent. To keep things in perspective, covid-19 had a fatality rate of 1.02 percent. Like covid-19, the Nipah virus originated with fruit bats, though it infected people after moving to pigs in Malaysia. It has similar symptoms to covid-19, but now human-to-human infection has also been reported. Though Pakistan managed to deal with the covid-19 phenomenon, its healthcare services must now gear up to handle the coming of this disease. Covid-19 took about 7 million lives, and continues to be a killer. While polio is an extremely debilitating virus, the Ripah virus may cause much greater devastation. There is no guarantee the country is ready for such a disease. Worse, perhaps, there is little indication that the lessons of the covid-19 epidemic have been learnt.
There is a certain irony that while a new virus threatens, an old one has not been overcome. One of the positive developments has been that covid-19 stimulated research into a vaccine, but it is still at a preliminary stage. It awaits an outbreak large enough to allow clinical trials. The world can only hope that the time has not arrived. It is perhaps ironic that the world has just settled one conflict, the one in Gaza, and is near settling another, the one in Ukraine, just in time to face a deadly disease.
