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| October 15, 2003 | Wednesday | Sha'aban 18, 1424 |
20,000 children given polio drops in Capital
ISLAMABAD, Oct 14: As many as 20,000 children were immunized on the first day of a three-day polio campaign that started on Tuesday in the rural areas of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).
Dr Zafarul Haq Lodhi, District Health Officer, Islamabad, told Dawn that the health department had constituted over 150 mobile teams, which will go from door to door to administer polio drops to the children in remote as well as urban areas of the capital.
He said over 55,000 children living in the rural areas under the age of five would be immunized during the second round of the campaign.
During the previous immunization campaign, he said, the administration had achieved 100 per cent target and expressed the hope that the same experience would be repeated this time also.
Overall, 75,000 teams have been constituted throughout the country to administer polio vaccine to over 30 million children along with Vitamin-A supplementation to about 24 million children between the age of five to six months. The three-day countrywide campaign will conclude on Thursday (October 16).
The health experts associated with the campaign said Pakistan was among 7 last polio endemic countries, therefore, it was among the priority countries as part of global campaign to eradicate polio virus by containing the disease to zero transmission by the end of next year - a target for the realization of which campaigns would continue to be launched.
The health experts have also appealed to the parents to ensure that their children under five are administered polio drops, as the slogan of the campaign was “Every time, every child.”
According to the WHO representative, Dr Khalid Bile, this year 71 cases of polio had been reported from Pakistan as compared with 93 cases in 2002 from 35 districts of the country.
This year, 130 cases of polio have been reported from India and 116 from Nigeria. When the immunization campaign began in 1994, there were 527 reported cases throughout Pakistan. At the end of 2002, the virus was contained as a result of which only 93 cases were reported in 35 districts in the year 2002 and now 72 in 2003.
The total requirement for the year 2003 was estimated to be 209 million doses at a total cost of $20 million. Of this, $9.6 million, it was told earlier, had been contributed by the Government of Japan and the rest by the World Bank and Canadian International Development Authority through Unicef.
The effort to eradicate polio stands out as a highly successful initiative not only protecting millions of children in Pakistan from permanent disability, but also in the very near future, ensuring a polio-free Pakistan.
When the initiative was launched in 1988, there were 125 polio-endemic countries. Tremendous progress has been made since then with the number of polio cases declining from over 350,000 at the outset to less than 2000 in 2002 in just 10 countries.
Earlier, the health minister, Mohammad Nasir Khan, had announced that if transmission of polio virus was interrupted by the end of 2003, still sporadic cases might continue in isolated areas of the country for some time. Therefore, “mopping up” campaigns would then be necessary to eradicate the remaining pockets of poliovirus.
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