MULTAN, May 14: The National Institute of Health, Islamabad, has confirmed dreadful P1 strain of polio in seven cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) reported from one village of Rajanpur district.

Health department sources told Dawn on Tuesday that samples of AFP-affected children in Rajanpur’s Hajipur Union Council were sent to the NIH last month for laboratory tests and their results had been positive for dreadful P1 strain of polio.

The occurrence of such a high number of polio cases in one union council has exposed the performance of the expanded programme for immunization (EPI) wing of the provincial health department.

When contacted, the elders of Hajipur union council said that no one has ever visited the area for anti-polio vaccination.

Source in the polio surveillance wing said apparently the EPI coverage in the locality was hardly 15 per cent. They said all the NIH-confirmed polio victims had been paralysed permanently.

They said that some of the Hajipur victims had not been administered anti-polio vaccine while other fell prey to the dreadful disease for being partially vaccinated.

It was learnt that a senior paediatrician of the district had reported fairly a large number of polio cases. But the health department authorities were trying to conceal the actual number of affected children in the district.

Paediatricians from Rajanpur, Muzaffargarh, Leiah and Dera Ghazi Khan districts of the former Dera Ghazi Khan division had been reporting polio cases since the last quarter of the year 2001. The provincial health department authorities had been directing all the paediatricians of former Dera Ghazi Khan division to stop reporting polio cases in black and white.

Punjab Health Services Director-General Dr Yaqoob Jaffar had on Nov 26, 2001, claimed that there were only 28 polio cases reported from all over the province.

According to the DG, nine polio cases were reported from Dera Ghazi Khan, eight from Rajanpur, three from Muzaffargarh and two from Rahim Yar Khan by the third week of November. Ironically, some 23 polio cases had been reported only at one health facility of Dera Ghazi Khan district by then.

There are around 100 state-run health facilities in Dera Ghazi Khan. Survey reports of the project wing of the health department revealed that the state-run health facilities hardly provide one-fourth of the total health coverage in the Punjab.

Punjab Health Minister Prof Dr Mahmood Chaudhry had said that the private sector had been catering to the needs of 65 per cent patients in the province.

The acute flaccid paralysis cases reported at the state-run facilities might not depict the actual picture of the alarming number of polio cases in the province. There has been no surveillance system to check polio cases reported to the private sector health facilities.

Meanwhile, in order to monitor the mopping up campaign to combat the ‘polio challenge’, the WHO has posted for six months its representative, Ms Veena, at Dera Ghazi Khan from where four more cases of acute flaccid paralysis were reported last week.