Sir Gus Nossal recently re-stated the need for Australia to direct more effort to extend vaccination programs to reach the world’s poorest children.
My memory of the 1956 Salk polio mass vaccination is standing in line at the suburban primary school and waiting for the Salk jab. That memory was revived on reading Atul Gawande’s account, in his book Better, of a more recent Sabin polio vaccination campaign in 2003, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. “The plan .. was to employ thirty-seven thousand vaccinators and four thousand health care supervisors, rent two thousand vehicles, supply more than eighteen thousand insulated vaccine carriers, and have the workers go door to door to vaccinate 4.2 million children. In three days.”
He made observations about other campaigns. “An outbreak in Kandahar in 2002 was halted by a WHO-led mop-up operation despite the Afghan war.”
Is there, then, a model of application from the way things were done at Karnataka, that we may apply to aid dispensed to the villages of Afghanistan, like vaccinations, textbooks and writing materials, clean water, waste disposal, agricultural improvements and cheap power? It may be easier to fly trained workers in to build the schools and health centres, install the pumps and drains, then fly them out, but perhaps the Karnataka method is more useful.
The history of Afghanistan suggests that aid workers, conversant in the local dialects, are needed in every valley of the non-urban regions.
However, the gap between our current involvement, and something that approaches a working model, can be realised from a short news item by American Forces Network Afghanistan. The commentary remarks “The Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team’s public information officer speaks Pashto!” Remarkable, since Pashto is the language of the majority of Afghans.
Australians can be pretty sure that our wish to have all children in Uruzgan province vaccinated and schooled will depend on having our aid and construction workers speak Pashto.
[sent to Health Issues, not published]
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