Polio campaign: Sorry, no volunteers

DCO, health secretary pledge to make Lahore polio-free.

LAHORE: The five-day anti-polio drive that will begin from March 7 will be administered without the help of volunteers. This was announced by Nazimuddin Gujjar, the district vaccination supervisor during the campaign preparations underway at the Town Hall on Wednesday.

Gujjar said that the decision was made by the DCO. During the preparations, the supervisors and other officials of the Health Department reviewed the plan to carry out the drive. Gujjar said that the DCO had asked the City District Government (CDGL) to depute workers for the immunisation.

“Every child under five is our target. We will make it a point to approach each and every child in the city,” Gujjar said. “However, there will be an added focus on lower income group, especially those who have migrated to Lahore from nearby villages,” he added.

He said that DCO Ahad Cheema and Health Secretary Fawad Hassan Fawad were determined to make Lahore a polio-free district. For that purpose, it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that each household was visited during the drive, he said.

The DCO’s decision to only involve employees has put an added pressure on the polio teams, he said. The new employees have to be trained and deputed to their respective areas before the campaign begins.

There are a total of 3,200 health workers in the anti-polio drive currently. For door-to-door survey and immunisation, at least 6,000 workers are required to cover each of the towns in Lahore, he added.

According to a CDGL official, the decision not to take volunteers was taken as some of them tended to be non serious and irresponsible. He said their have been cases of negligence by the volunteers in the past.

Mohsin Qureshi, the Gulberg Town zonal in charge, said that 420 new workers have been allocated for the drive and they had to be trained.

He said that some private schools had offered their premises to set up immunisation camps.

District officer (Health) Dr Tariq Ramzan said that for Lahore to be declared a polio-free city, it had to pass for two years without a single case. He said that besides some schools, camps will be set up in major hospitals and orphanages around the city.

He said that the last case of polio in Pakistan was diagnosed on 2009 in an Afghan family who had migrated to Lahore from Peshawar.

“Susceptibility to polio increases in unhygienic environments.  This makes lower and lower middle class families with unhygienic lifestyles easy targets,” he said.

Ramzan said it was also important to make sure that no child was issued a birth certificate till the child was properly vaccinated.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2011.