Anti-polio campaign commences in different parts of Pakistan
Polio mainly affects children under the age of five.
ISLAMABAD (Web Desk) – Anti-polio campaign has been initiated in different parts of Pakistan on Monady, Dunya News reported.
Polio is a highly contagious disease caused by a virus that invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis within hours. It mainly affects children under the age of five.
A five-day supplementary polio immunization drive started today in the 12 districts of Sindh.
According to Radio Pakistan, a total of 2.498 million children will be vaccinated in Karachi, Sukkur, Ghotki, Khairpur, Larkana, Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Kashmore, Kamber, Dadu, Nawabshah, Sanghar and Naushahro Feroze districts.
Three-day anti-polio drive also begins in various areas of ten districts of Balochistan where more than 0.5 million children under the age of five year would be administered polio drops.
Moreover, a three-day special anti-polio campaign starts today in selected areas of FATA, Frontier Regions and eight districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. More than nine hundred sixty five thousand children in FATA and one hundred ninety nine thousand children below the age of five in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would be vaccinated during the campaign.
Pakistan is moving closer to eradicating polio with no fresh traces of the crippling childhood disease found in sewage samples taken from 40 high-risk sites across the country over April.
11 new polio cases have been recorded since the start of the year compared to 25 in the same period in 2015, a year which itself saw an overall decline in incidents of the disease.
Pakistan hopes to be removed from the list of polio-endemic countries by 2018 by achieving its goal of no fresh cases for a year.
Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by militant attacks on immunisation teams that have claimed more than 100 lives since December 2012.
Militants‘ opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. He was killed there by US forces in 2011.
