Steering committee on polio: Over 96,000 displaced children vaccinated

Missed IDP children to be vaccinated during transit by PTPs.

ISLAMABAD:

Some 96,487 children of displaced families have been administered anti-polio vaccines at different permanent transit points since the military mounted its Zarb-e-Azb operation in the North Waziristan Agency.

On Friday, members of the Steering Committee on Polio Eradication were informed that a total of 76,565 children were vaccinated at the permanent transit points established at FR Bannu, 13,500 were immunised at the transit points at Hangu/Thal while 1,648 children were vaccinated at DI Khan.

Some 3,500 IDP children were vaccinated during a campaign in Bannu and 1,274 children were given Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) during a campaign in Lakki Marwat, the committee was told.

According to an official in the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulation and Coordination (NHSRC), these children are being vaccinated under the Emergency Vaccination Plan (EVP) for internally displaced persons (IDPs) implemented by the federal government.

SOURCE: PRIME MINISTER’S POLIO CELL

The EVP was launched along with the Zarb-e-Azb operation and is being headed by the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions (Safron) which is working in collaboration with the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa health department.

For this plan, polio vaccines have been provided by the federal Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) from its limited stock for routine immunisation and it vaccination activities are being monitored by the Prime Minister’s Monitoring and Coordination Cell for Polio, said the official.

“The aim of the Emergency Vaccination Plan is to vaccinate all those 250,000 children, who since 2012 have not been vaccinated against polio due to law and order situation,” said the official.

The steering committee during the meeting was informed that according to the emergency plan, in addition to vaccination at PTPs, polio vaccine will be administered at the time of registration to all IDP children missed during transit by the PTPs.



With at-least three rounds of short interval additional doses (SIAD) of OPV, routine immunisation including measles vaccine and vitamin-A will also be administered to all children.

No anti-polio drives were held in North Waziristan since the middle of 2012 and an estimated 2,50,000-plus children in the region had not received a single dose of polio vaccine during this time.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2014.