Among many big issues, the country is suffering from is the low literacy rate in Pakistan, which is the lowest in Southeast Asia. The lower literacy rate is a bigger hindrance to the prosperity of any region. The people of the region who remain uneducated mostly remain impoverished and sidelined. Consequently, they miss the necessities of life like food, shelter, education, health, etc. This results in the poor economic, political, and social system of the overall country.
In Pakistan, every city has its own literacy rate and one can draw a conclusion about the state of the people based on the region’s literacy rate. Lower the literacy rate lower is the place’s life expectancy rate and higher is the spread of disease. On the other hand, the higher the literacy rate more people are aware of their responsibilities to lead a better lifestyle.
Many diseases are still existing in the country solely because people do not vaccinate their infants. They grow to contract diseases and their whole life gets disturbed. This issue is directly attributed to the fact that whether the citizens of the region are educated and aware enough to know their responsibilities. Due to illiteracy, which is mostly in rural far-flung areas, people are unaware of the importance of vaccination to the children.
All this talk is evident from the fact that the whole world has completely eradicated polio and Pakistan is again seeing a clear surge in cases. Unfortunately, the only reason for it is that people in many rural towns of the country have an anti-vaccination sentiment and many believe in some wild conspiracy theories that the vaccinations are meant to harm them in some other ways. The end result; they ignore the dangers of missing out on vaccination and risk their child’s life.
There are similarly many other diseases that keep on spreading due to no vaccination. A lot of the diseases could be avoided if the child is properly vaccinated in childhood. Although, the government did efforts to go the hard way and instead of waiting for the parents of the child to show up at the hospital for child’s checkup and vaccination, they assembled teams of volunteers to visit each and every home and give drops to children under the age of 5. This was particularly done in the provinces of KPK and Baluchistan because they reported many cases in the last couple of years.
But still, the government is supposed to do more to eradicate the life-threatening disease. Because people due to lack of awareness do effort to keep their kids away from vaccination. Cases of violence were also reported recently, in which polio teams of volunteers were attacked by the villages because they believed that polio is part of some sister gameplay of the west to make their kids impotent when they grow up.
The government should take influential people of the villages on board and use their power to ensure nobody misses the vaccinations. Paper, electronic and social media must be utilized to run countrywide campaigns that educate the masses. In basic health units, tehsil headquarters, and district headquarter hospitals, separate vaccination departments should also be established where free of cost vaccination may be available by the courteous staff.
A strategy must be formulated to penalize the negligence of people in the health sector and parents must be fined who resist the vaccination. The concerned law enforcement agencies should take strict action in this regard, otherwise, the return of diseases like polio, measles, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, tetanus, rotavirus will continue to pose threat to the younger generation of the country.
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