Its deputy minister, Dr Lee Boon Chye, said the ministry had marked Sabah as a high-risk area and did what was necessary to prevent an outbreak of the virus there.
A three-month-old Malaysian boy from Tuaran was detected with polio on Dec 8, making it the first case in the country since 1992. Malaysia has been declared polio-free since 2000.
Lee said it was not likely that there would be further cases as the incubation period appeared to be over.
He said that while the vaccination programme involving children in Sabah was now at 100%, the immunisation for polio was not a one-off matter, as it required three staggered vaccinations to be fully effective.
The first dose gave 20% protection, the second raised it 80% and the final one could guarantee a 99% shield from polio, he said.
Lee said another issue was getting all the people, including non-citizens, to be vaccinated for polio, which was a costly affair involving “tens of millions of ringgit” for the entire population.
Another matter, he said, was to get the oral polio vaccine (OPV) in high volumes, and the vaccine had to be “dead cold” to be viable and transported through cold storage.
“It will take us a while to procure the OPV. We are talking to the World Health Organisation, Unicef and the Philippine government. The Filipinos have cheaper medicines,” he said.
He said the OPV was stopped in Malaysia in 2016 and replaced with injected vaccines.
Lee said that immediately after the Tuaran polio incident, the government decided it would administer polio vaccines to all children in Sabah aged two months to five years.
He said “high risk” areas with undocumented migrant children were the focus of the vaccination drive.
The high-risk districts, as reported by the Sabah Health Department, were Kota Kinabalu, Penampang and Putatan on the west coast, and Sandakan, Lahad Datu, Kunak and Semporna in the east.
Asked if polio vaccination would be made mandatory, Lee said it was something the government was looking at. He said the country’s vaccination rate was already good at 95%, which met international standards to counter outbreaks.
RM250 fine for smokers at eateries stays
Lee said 5,000 environmental health officers were on standby to fine smokers at eateries from Jan 1, as scheduled.
He said those who violated the law would have to pay a fine of RM250, and those who did not pay could be prosecuted in court, where the fine could go as high as RM10,000.
‘Good doctors don’t prescribe antibiotics’
Earlier, opening the Antimicrobial Resistance Seminar at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Lee called on patients to stop requesting doctors to prescribe them with antibiotics.
He said this was because the resistant strain of bacteria had emerged and spread throughout the country, reducing the usefulness of antibiotics.
Unnecessary antibiotic consumption, he said, had led to patients not responding well to standard treatments and making diseases difficult to cure.
Lee said a 2017 survey showed that Malaysians took 10.6 defined daily doses out of 1,000 per day, which translated to at least one out of 10 Malaysians on antibiotics daily.
This was frightening, he said, with WHO estimating drug-resistant diseases causing at least 700,000 deaths globally a year, including 230,000 deaths from “multidrug-resistant tuberculosis”.
He said that if nothing was done, the figure could increase to 10 million deaths globally per year by 2050 under the most alarming scenario.
“Most of the common colds are caused by viruses and do not need antibiotics. Antibiotics are used only when secondary infection occurs, which is rarely the case for upper respiratory throat infections.
“The best doctors are those who do not prescribe antibiotics,” he said.
He said an action plan on countering antimicrobial resistance, as a result of overuse of antibiotics, was in effect from 2017 to 2021.