Summary The provincial government has ensured strict safety measurements.
QUETTA (Dunya News/Reuters) – A three-day anti-polio drive in as many as 32 districts of Balochistan has been continued on third day today (Wednesday).
The campaign aims to vaccinate 23,83,310 children under the age of five. Around 6661 polio teams are going door to door to vaccinate the targeted population, while some of the workers have been deputed at fixed centres.
The provincial government has ensured strict safety measurements for three days as police and Levies personnel were deployed at the security.
However, the campaign will continue for seven days in Frontier Region Peshawar, North and South Waziristan.
Earlier, the campaign was also started in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh and Punjab to inoculate polio drops to the children.
Polio is a highly infectious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours.
A $5.5 billion global eradication plan was launched in April with the aim of vaccinating 250 million children multiple times each year to stop the virus finding new footholds, and stepping up surveillance in more than 70 countries.
It is now endemic in only two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s polio cases are declining, with just 54 cases of polio virus reported last year, down more than 80 percent from 2014, when the country suffered a large spike in cases.
Efforts to eliminate polio in Pakistan have been complicated in recent years, as polio workers have faced attacks by militants who say the health teams are Western spies, or that the vaccines they administer are intended to sterilise children.
In January, a suicide bomber killed at least 15 people outside a polio eradication centre in the restive western city of Quetta, with two militant groups claiming responsibility.
