Cricket boosts largest-ever vaccination campaign

World Cup promotion helps beat polio in India.
11 February 2003

TOM CLARKE

85 percent of last year's 1556 polio cases were in India. © WHO

More than a million volunteer teams in India are carrying out the largest-ever mass-immunization campaign against polio this week. Capitalizing on the nation's passion for cricket, the volunteers hope to vaccinate all of India's 165 million children under the age of five - in just six days.

India's poor vaccine coverage meant that the country's 1323 cases of polio last year represented 85% of the world's total. In 2001 the World Health Organization's (WHO's) global campaign to eradicate polio had reduced the number of cases worldwide to 483. "It's been a significant setback," says Bob Keegan, deputy director of polio eradication at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.

"We need a massive social mobilization effort," says Savita Varde-Naqvi of the children's charity UNICEF in New Delhi. And the one thing that gets many Indians going is cricket. "Indian people eat, drink and breathe cricket," she says.

In the run-up to this week's campaign - deliberately timed to coincide with the beginning of the cricketing World Cup in South Africa - the cricket team have been promoting polio vaccination in TV commercials, competitions and events. "If [Indian cricket captain] Saurav Ganguly tells kids to get vaccinated against polio, they will," says Varde-Naqvi.

Volunteers will be manning vaccination booths in Indian schools and public places. They will also go from door-to-door in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to drip the liquid vaccine into the mouths of its 33 million children - as many as 10% of whom are unvaccinated. Every one of the 250,000 babies born in the state each month must be immunized if polio is to be stopped.

Uttar Pradesh is India's main polio trouble-spot for two reasons. Being one of the country's poorest yet most populous states, aid efforts against malnutrition and malaria often take priority over those against polio, explains Varde-Naqvi. And socially excluded groups in the area - such as religious minorities - often mistrust authorities, so families do not bring their children to vaccination centres.

The WHO had hoped to declare poliovirus eradicated worldwide by 2005. The deadline is now being pushed back to 2006 at least, even though only seven countries worldwide now have the virus, down from ten last year. Backing polio into geographical corners should make it easier to stamp out. "We could be back on course in six months," says Keegan.