Poliovirus discovered in Lahore’s sewage

–Govt spokesperson refutes claim, says ‘virus was reported in July’

LAHORE: Samples of water collected from Lahore’s sewage have been discovered to be carrying poliovirus for two consecutive months, media reports claimed on Thursday.

According to reports, after testing samples collected from Outfall Road on July 11, the Department of Health confirmed the presence of poliovirus in the city’s sewerage waters. The virus was also found in the sewage samples gathered earlier in June.

Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a crippling childhood disease caused by the poliovirus. It is preventable through immunisation. Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, that suffers from endemic polio, a childhood virus that can cause paralysis or death.

Amid reports that the health department has summoned a meeting of officials concerned to deal with the issue of the continous presence of the virus in the sewage waters, the provincial government has refuted claims that a new strand of the poliovirus had been detected.

“The reports of a new poliovirus in Lahore are false and all concerned departments have confirmed it,” said health department spokesperson Ikhlaq Ahmad.

He added that the virus was reported in July and the department has launched an investigation into it.

“All samples of poliovirus that were detected previously in Punjab came from other areas,” Ahmad elaborated.

The health department spokesperson further said that local strands of the virus did not exist in the province and the cases detected in the province originated from Afghanistan or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

Pakistan has been battling polio for the past several years and is close to completely eradicating the disease as the number of cases have decreased in the past few years.

The number of cases declined from 306 in 2014 to 54 in 2015, 20 in 2016 and eight in 2017. In 2018, three polio cases have so far been reported – all from Balochistan.

A country must have no cases for three consecutive years in order to be considered to have eradicated polio by the World Health Organisation.

Affecting mostly children under the age of five, polio has no cure and can only be prevented by giving a child multiple vaccine doses.

According to the WHO, the number of polio cases worldwide has fallen by more than 99 percent since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases then to 22 reported cases in 2017.