Five-day polio drive to start from tomorrow

A five-day first nationwide door-to-door polio campaign of 2017-18 low transmission season will be kicked off from tomorrow (September 18-22), targeting a total of 37.74 million children under the age of five.

The polio campaign will start in Quetta from September 18-22, Lahore from September 19-22 and in Karachi Community Based Vaccination (CBV) and special mobile team on September 16-22, while minor rescheduling in newly de-notified areas of Khyber, North Waziristan (NWA) & South Waziristan Agency (SWA) and select UCs in Rojhan and Rajanpur tehsils could be made.

According to detail, the programme will target a total of 37.74 million under five children (18.76 million in Punjab, 8.6 million in Sindh, 5.6 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 2.4 million in Balochistan, 1.034 million in FATA, 0.74 million in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 0.234 million in Gilgit Baltistan (GB) and 0.312 million children in Islamabad) by utilizing around 42 million doses of OPV.

In the core reservoir areas covered through Community Based Vaccination (CBV) approach, it will be a 5 days campaign and 2 days catch-up, while in the mobile team areas, there will be a 3 days campaign and 1-2 day catch-up.

A total of 250,000 personnel will strive to achieve the set targets across Pakistan including 23,250 Area In-charges, 7,896 UC Medical Officers, 182,787 Mobile, 10,122 Fixed and 11,220 Transit team members.

National Emergency Operation Center has urged entire team to strive hard for best ever nationwide campaign setting the foundation of wiping out the virus from the last remaining areas. The National Task Force under Prime Minister as well as the national and provincial political and religious leadership has also requested all sectors especially the parents to fully facilitate our frontline heroes (Sehat Muhafiz) in this noble cause.

Talking to Pakistan Today, Ministry of National Health PRO Sajid Hussain Shah said that since the world started accepting Pakistan’s efforts to eradicate the polio; hence the country has been chosen to host a prestigious regional conference of health ministers on October 9-12, 2017.

He said that health ministers from 22 countries in South Asia, the Middle East, West Asia and North Africa would participate in the conference aimed at discussing various chronic diseases, including polio, TB, malaria and AIDS, etc. so as to chalk out strategies as how the region could be made safer.

He said that it was really great achievement for the country, as there was a time when Pakistan was about to face a travel ban owing to the mounting polio cases.

According to detail, the current polio epidemiology in the country is best ever observed, as cases have declined from 306 in 2014 to 54 in 2015 and only 20 in 2016. Momentum is maintained in 2017 where the current case count of 4 compares to 16 same point in time during 2016.

The spokesperson said that the conference would provide an opportunity to Pakistan to learn from the experiences of other countries as how to tackle the chronic diseases, while they would also got a chance to learn from Pakistan as how it brought a considerable decrease in polio cases, so it could prove a really helpful to deal with chronic diseases in the region.