Second phase of anti-polio drive in Sindh starts

Campaign to cover Karachi, Thatta, Sujawal and Badin districts

KARACHI: The Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) for Polio in Sindh started on Monday the second phase of the ongoing anti-polio campaign. The drive will cover all six districts of Karachi along with Thatta, Sujawal and Badin.

The campaign, which is to continue till July 21, was inaugurated in Karachi by the city's commissioner, Ejaz Ahmed Khan, after he administered polio drops to children.

More than 7,000 teams of volunteers will conduct the drive that will be supervised by the deputy commissioners of the respective districts. The drive is targeting 2.52 million children under five years of age, out of which 1.8 million children will be vaccinated in Karachi.



The first phase of the campaign was held from July 10 to July 13 during which around 1.56 million children under five years of age were vaccinated in Jacobabad, Kamber-Shahadkot, Larkana, Shikarpur and Sukkur districts, as well as in select areas in the districts of Dadu, Ghotki, Kashmore, Khairpur, Naushero Feroz, Sanghar and Shaheed Benazirabad.

Sindh has not reported a single case of polio in 2017. However, in the current year, there have been three new cases of polio in Pakistan, one each in Punjab, Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan.

In spite of the achievement, Sindh EOC for Polio Coordinator Fayaz Jatoi is of the view that the province needs sustained efforts in order to avoid emergence of new polio cases. "We cannot afford to relax, the virus still springs up in the environment from time to time and as long as that happens, there is always a chance that polio will return," Jatoi shared his concerns, adding that the EOC not only has to maintain its performance but also has to improve in order to banish the polio virus from Pakistan once and for all, as the country has never been so close to getting rid of polio.



In order to see ourselves at the finish line, we need to continue covering the children who were missed during earlier campaigns, concentrate on high-risk mobile population and focus on training staff, Jatoi summed up.