Eradicating disease: Three-day polio drive kicks off in Punjab today

Health department constitutes over 44,000 teams to perform duty.

LAHORE: Around 18.7 million children under the age of five years will be immunised province-wide during a three-day polio campaign that kicks off today (Monday). Just one polio case has emerged so far in Punjab.

“Although our job is satisfactory but continued presence of polio virus in Multan, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Dera Ghazi Khan indicates, we have to make more efforts to eradicate the disease,” said Punjab Primary and Secondary Healthcare Minister Khawaja Imran Nazir while speaking at a meeting on Sunday.

The department has constituted over 44,000 teams in the province, including 378,45 mobile teams, 4,439 fixed teams and 2,370 transit teams. Polio is epidemic in just three countries of the world – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Punjab’s Emergency Operation Coordinator Dr Munir Ahmed said recent environmental samples found in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and Dera Ghazi Khan were a cause of concern and indicate the virus’s presence in the environment. “We were trying to reach out to mobile and migrant populations coming from polio-affected areas,” he added.

Around 20 polio cases were reported in 2016 with eight cases in Sindh, eight in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, two in FATA and two in Balochistan. In Punjab, no polio case was reported in 2016. Two cases have been reported in Pakistan this year.

People can contact helpline 0800-99000 if a polio team does not reach their areas.

In Multan, around 1,400 workers will perform duties during the three-day polio drive in the district Bhakkar for which all preparations have been completed, said District Health Officer Dr Muhammad Nawaz Khan. He was briefing the vaccination teams at the District Health Office, Bhakkar on Sunday.

During the drive, 269,229 children below the age of five years would be administered polio drops, he said, adding that 624 mobile teams, 69 fixed teams at hospitals and health centres and 40 teams at transit points would vaccinate children.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2017.