First polio case of the year surfaces in Karachi

Aijaz Khan had missed two OPV doses through routine immunisation

KARACHI: A three-year-old child in Karachi has been diagnosed with the crippling polio disease, a first in the city since the beginning of the year.

Aijaz Khan, son of Sher Ali Khan, is 34 months old and having the onset of paralysis, confirmed by a Karachi-based laboratory. According to the Aijaz's parents, he had missed two OPV doses through routine immunisation.



However, more than seven doses had been dispensed to him during supplementary immunisation activities since the child’s birth and prior to the onset of his weakness, sources told The Express Tribune.

The child belongs to a Pashtun family of the Mohmand tribe and lives in Yousuf Goth of Surjani Town in the city’s west.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio, a crippling childhood disease, remains endemic. Attempts to eradicate it have been badly hit by militant attacks on immunisation teams that have claimed nearly 80 lives since December 2012.



In 2014 the number of polio cases recorded in Pakistan soared to 306, the highest in 14 years. In 2015, 52 polio cases were reported in Pakistan with seven of them from Balochistan.

In December, 2015, a seventeen-month-old child of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Town had been diagnosed with the crippling virus, taking the toll to seven in the city and 12 in the entire Sindh province last year.