Four-year-old girl contracts polio

This is the ninth case to emerge in Sindh since January

KARACHI: The Sindh Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) for polio has confirmed a new polio case in Naushero Feroze district on Saturday. This takes Sindh's total tally to 9 and Pakistan's tally to 30 for the current year.

According to a statement released by the EOC, a four-year-old girl has contracted the crippling virus and has been experiencing weakness in her facial muscles, among other symptoms, in Lalia union council since February 23.

According to her parents, the child has so far received seven doses of the oral polio vaccine with no inactivated polio vaccine administered. Investigation into her vaccination history is still in progress.

Both the National EOC and Sindh EOC have started to fight back to get polio eradication on track and reverse the trend of new cases. The first step in this was an immunisation campaign in December, followed by a case response in January and yet another campaign conducted in February.

The February campaign in Karachi covered 97.5 per cent of the targeted children under the age of five, while the overall Sindh campaigns achieved over 100 per cent coverage, including children visiting Sindh from elsewhere.

An EOC statement said that the efforts and delivery of campaigns over the next few months would bridge the immunity gap, leading to a significant decrease in intensity of virus transmission in the second half of 2020.

Both the National and Sindh EOCs urged parents to ensure the immunisation of their children, in routine vaccinations as well as special campaigns planned by the programme during the next few months.

The statement explained that a failure in sustained campaigns last year left a large immunity gap, which the EOC was struggling to address. Last year in Peshawar, propaganda and community resistance led to a gap in polio vaccination drives, it added.

It further said that the EOC had designed high-quality response campaigns for the current year and was working in emergency mode to speed up the elimination of polio.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2020.