Parents who refuse polio vaccine to be photographed

RAWALPINDI: Polio vaccinators will now take pictures of parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated against polio, District Coordination Officer (DCO) Talat Mehmood Gondal said on Thursday.

Chairing a meeting to review polio vaccination drive arrangements, he said vaccinators will be provided with android mobile phones to help make anti-polio campaign a success. Gondal said children who were missed in the last polio drive would be specifically targeted in the upcoming vaccination drive which is expected to start next week from October 24.

In addition to taking pictures of parents who refused vaccination, their phone numbers would also be collected. He said polio drops would be administered to unattended children within seven to 14 days in order to eliminate the crippling disease.



Earlier on June 3, more than 2,100 parents refused to polio drops for their children in Bannu as the provincial government started a three-day vaccination campaign in the district.

Similarly, on March 19, parents of over 12,000 children refused to support the recent immunisation campaign against the virus in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and stopped their children from getting inoculated.

Experts said in May that Pakistan was 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.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 21^st, 2016.