The next nationwide polio drive will be launched in the second last week of September which will see around 270,000 polio workers canvass the country to vaccinate almost 40 million children under five-years-of-age.
This was disclosed during a high-level meeting at the National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication on Wednesday. It was chaired by the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination Dr Faisal Sultan and was attended by the National Health Services Secretary Aamir Ashraf Khawaja and other senior officials.
Dr Rana Muhammad Safdar, the coordinator for the National Emergency Operations Centre, presented a comprehensive review of the polio situation in the country.
“The programme conducted a forensic analysis of the significant upsurge in polio in 2019, based on which a transformation process was initiated,” Dr Safdar said. As many as 147 polio cases were reported in 2019, including 93 from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and 30 from Sindh.
Dr Safdar said that based on the new policy, a sense of collective responsibility was promoted while a door-to-door vaccination successfully resumed with nationwide campaigns in December 2019 and February 2020.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 3rd, 2020.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ