PESHAWAR, May 7: The government has launched a new strategy to ensure that all children get oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the high-risk areas of Federally Administered Tribal Areas, officials said.

“The strategy called 'short interventional additional dose' is aimed at conducting frequent campaigns in short intervals to reach all the children of immunisable age,” said Dr Janbaz Afridi, deputy director of Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), on Saturday while talking to this correspondent.

The Fata has so far recorded 15 polio cases of the total 33 in the country this year.

He said that the authorities had been facing a daunting task of administering OPV to the targeted children in militancy-hit areas of the Fata due to which the new strategy had been put in place.

He said the additional dose had been introduced in Bajaur Agency on pilot basis from May and the strategy would be later adopted in other tribal agencies.

He said that now the vaccinators would also try to reach majority of the children missed during the regular vaccination campaigns.

Dr Janbaz said that about 45,403 of the targeted 2,210,443 children were missed during the regular campaigns due to which the risk of poliomyelitis had increased.

He said that mass mobility was the major problem in Bajaur Agency where people kept migrating from one place to other due to militancy or military operations.

Under the new scheme, three campaigns will be conducted every month to cover maximum number of children, he said.

Agency surgeon of Bajaur Dr Jehanzeb Dawar told this reporter that the new strategy would bear fruit, as during three campaigns a month till August efforts would be made to reach all the children in targeted area.

He said that besides new intervention they had also launched collaboration with local ulema and prayer leaders to end or minimise the polio refusal cases.

He said that in December 2009, they had recorded 1,600 chronic refusal cases in the accessible areas, which had been brought to zero in April 2011.

He said that this was made possible due to the intervention by National Research and Development Foundation (NRDF), which had enlisted ulema's support in their respective areas.

NRDF's national coordinator Tahseenullah said that they had approached the ulema in tribal areas to convince them that OPV was safe for the protection of children against the crippling polio disease and the initiative had been showing results.