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Setarah Khatoon was 15 when she left school to marry a boy from India’s northeast state of Bihar. She was barely 16 when she had her first miscarriage, and by 20, she'd had two more. So when the mother of one surviving baby girl saw Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan’s television ads telling parents that just “two drops of medicine” could help keep a child alive for life, Ms. Khatoon took her infant to the nearest pharmacy and asked how to vaccinate her only child against polio.
“Two drops of life,” she immediately recalls at her tiny apartment in a housing colony within M-Ward, Mumbai’s poorest and least developed collection of government resettlement buildings and slums. Khatoon says the pharmacist she found directed her to a nearby clinic run by a local nongovernmental organization, Doctors For You. There, her infant became the first in their family to get vaccinations, and Khatoon herself got access to regular medical check-ups, information about nutrition, and if she wanted it, birth control.
Advertisements such as those that prompted Khatoon to seek help are part of an unprecedented campaign by the central government in New Delhi and India’s state governments to eradicate and keep wild poliovirus out of India. This January marked the second year that India, long considered a major exporter of poliovirus, did not record a new case of the infection – leaving Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria the last countries still battling the disease.
Now, as India looks set to be considered officially "polio free" by the end of this year, health officials are considering the successful combination of advertising and government buy-in a promising model to apply to other health initiatives in the country.
www.csmonitor.com
“Two drops of life,” she immediately recalls at her tiny apartment in a housing colony within M-Ward, Mumbai’s poorest and least developed collection of government resettlement buildings and slums. Khatoon says the pharmacist she found directed her to a nearby clinic run by a local nongovernmental organization, Doctors For You. There, her infant became the first in their family to get vaccinations, and Khatoon herself got access to regular medical check-ups, information about nutrition, and if she wanted it, birth control.
Advertisements such as those that prompted Khatoon to seek help are part of an unprecedented campaign by the central government in New Delhi and India’s state governments to eradicate and keep wild poliovirus out of India. This January marked the second year that India, long considered a major exporter of poliovirus, did not record a new case of the infection – leaving Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria the last countries still battling the disease.
Now, as India looks set to be considered officially "polio free" by the end of this year, health officials are considering the successful combination of advertising and government buy-in a promising model to apply to other health initiatives in the country.
Could India's polio eradication success story be a model for its other health issues?
A large, unprecedentedly coordinated campaign in India has eradicated polio. If no new cases are recorded by the end of this year, India will be officially considered polio-free.
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