Health worker administers polio drops to a child in Chaman town that borders with Afghanistan. PHOTO: INP
An official of the Balochistan Emergency Operation Cell (EOC) said poliovirus type-one was confirmed in samples taken from a three-month-old boy, Abdul Rehman Achakzai from Pashtunabad.
The EOC was set up last year to improve coordination, evaluation and timely implementation of plans related to routine polio immunisation drives across the country.
This is the first reported case in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. The earlier ones were confirmed in Loralai and Qila Abdullah districts.
The Quetta block – comprising Quetta, Qila Abdullah and Pishin – are high-risk polio areas, from where the majority of polio cases were reported last year. In 2014, 23 cases of poliovirus were confirmed in Balochistan.
Campaign put off
Owing to security concerns, the scheduled anti-polio drive was postponed in Quetta. The three-day campaign, however, got under way in 29 provincial districts aimed at administering polio vaccine to around two million children.
The national polio authorities plan to vaccinate a target population of 35.5 million children below the age of five throughout the country. The campaign has also been launched in 36 districts of Punjab, 25 districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 22 districts and 18 towns of Sindh, 10 districts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, seven districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, seven agencies and six frontier regions of Fata and two districts of Islamabad.
During the current drive, around 80,000 teams will go door to door to vaccinate children while more than 9,000 teams have been deputed at fixed centres. More than 4,000 polio teams will cover transit points.
Sources said the district health authorities would ensure polio vaccination teams were deployed at every health facility while transit teams would ensure that children on the move during the campaign days were provided oral polio vaccinations.
The district authorities are also coordinating with the law enforcement agencies to ensure security for the health workers and volunteers. The mandatory meetings of district polio eradication committees have been conducted to review the preparedness of the campaign while the training of frontline health workers and area in-charges has also been completed.
Pakistan is one of just three countries in the world where poliovirus is still endemic. – With additional input from
Published in The Express Tribune, March 17th, 2015.
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