Polio drive: One more Hyderabad area listed as high-risk

A one-year-old infant was diagnosed with polio last month in the Sehrish Nagar area.

HYDERABAD:

The health department has added one more union council (UC) in the ‘high risk’ category for its three-day immunisation round, which will begin from March 14. Hyderabad district already has 17 of its total 52 UCs in that list. The most recent addition is the Sehrish Nagar area where a one-year-old infant, Sundar Lal Bhagri, was diagnosed with polio last month.

Bhagri was treated at Civil Hospital, Hyderabad for more than two weeks before he was diagnosed with the disease. Earlier a patient was diagnosed with polio from Mirpurkhas district in January.

The district health officer, Dr Baksh Ali Pitafi, informed at a press conference on Friday that 279,713 children will be given the drops. Almost 686 mobile teams, 86 fixed points and 34 transit points have been set up.

According to Pitafi, parts of Hyderabad were at risk because of continuous migration from the rural areas of the province. “The Bhagri family had settled in Hyderabad after the floods in 2010,” but when questioned Pitafi admitted that the child was born in Hyderabad. He added that the child was also administered polio drops during seven different rounds of immunisation.

However, he was persistent is his arguments that the drug loses efficacy in those children who vomit the dose or have been suffering from diarrhea. Pitafi said that Bhagri’s brother had the same symptoms, a disclosure made by Dr Noman Arain last month who examined the child. “He is recovering because he had the Guillain Barre Syndrome, a different disorder which affects the nervous system but unlike polio, it allows recovery.”

The children’s father, Gulab Bhagri, is a rickshaw driver and the family lives in the Katchi Abadi in Sehrish Nagar.

Dr Muhammad Ashraf Memon, focal person of the polio campaign, explained that the high risk areas are categorised according to the population density of gypsies and nomads, lack of medical infrastructure and the discovery of polio cases. He said that almost Rs1.5 million is spent on each polio drive in the district.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2012.