November 24, 2008	Monday	Ziqa'ad 25, 1429

KARACHI, Nov 23: A fresh anti-polio campaign is being launched on Monday across the province following emergence of new polio cases.

Some 6.5 million children below the age of five years will be administered oral anti-polio drops during the three-day campaign, which is part of the national immunisation campaign.

Manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), Sindh, Dr Mazhar A. Khamesani has urged parents to ensure that their children are vaccinated during the campaign. He said field workers would be available in all areas of the province.

Dr Mazhar said that about 6,200 mobile, transient and fixed teams of vaccinators would take part in the drive to administer the OPV drops to children.

Sindh has added 16 cases to the country’s 103 confirmed polio cases so far this year. The new figure is equal to that of 2003.

The cases were detected in Karachi (4), Jacobabad (3), Khairpur (2), Shikarpur (1), Hyderabad (1), Naushahro Feroze (1), Dadu (1), Sanghar (1), Mirpurkhas (1) and Nawabshah (1).

The country had seen a considerable and gradual decline in polio cases until 2007, when 32 cases, 12 of them in Sindh alone, were reported.

However, anti-polio campaigners in the province largely feel that the situation can be improved if the executive district officers (health), town health officers and district governments properly patronised the routine immunisation for polio eradication and ensured establishment of an institutionalised system of accountability.

At a recent inter-provincial conference on polio, a senior health official of the Sindh government had stressed the need for controlling movement of nomads and other such people across provincial and district borders in order to prevent transmission and spread of the virus from one province to the other and also from one district to other.