KARACHI: Sindh recorded another case of polio — second of the year — in the past one month, again in a 22-month-old girl belonging to an Afghan family settled in the western fringes of the city, officials confirmed on Saturday.

“We have received confirmation from the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad and the World Health Organisation about the poliovirus detected in a 22-month-old girl,” said a health department official overseeing polio issues in Orangi Town.

He identified the girl as Jameela, daughter of Gul Noor, an Afghan refugee and labourer settled in Karachi.

He said the girl’s stool samples had been sent to the NIH early this month and the result confirmed wild poliovirus in the victim.

The good news, however, he gave was that the effect of the virus was ‘much milder’ and could be treated successfully.

“The girl had been inoculated with polio boosters for more than 10 times, which is why it is surprising for us to see her detected with poliovirus,” said another official.

He said it could be lower immunity in the girl which allowed the virus to attack her.

“But the thing which concerns us the more is that wild poliovirus is in the area which has to be eradicated,” said the official.

Dr Shafiq Ahmed, town health officer of Orangi, said he had seen the girl and he could confirm that she had largely evaded the lethality of the disease.

“She is lucky because of her family’s positive response to our polio teams for more than 10 times, which saved her from a lifelong disability,” he said.

Last month, a 24-month-old girl became the first polio case in Sindh. She belonged to a Pakhtun family, which had migrated to Karachi eight months before. She was a resident of Ittehad Colony of Baldia Town — an area categorised among the ‘most sensitive’ neighbourhoods by the government vis-à-vis polio immunisation.

Officials said the family had migrated to Karachi from the country’s troubled northwest — the region that recorded close to 100 cases of polio since January last year because of the Taliban militants’ ban on polio vaccination.

Officials in the health department are surprised by the frequent polio cases in the province. They had recorded four cases till the middle of November, but in the space of less than two months seven more cases — six in Karachi and another in Kashmore — had been detected.

They said despite maximum attention and continued immunisation campaigns, the situation was not satisfactory in Sindh at all.

In January, a special polio drive to inoculate the children of 40 ‘sensitive’ union councils of the metropolis had been abandoned when three vaccinators were shot dead by unidentified drive-by shooters.

The government has launched one-day special campaigns on Sundays in the least-covered neighbourhoods for two months now, which again, had shifted their attention from many areas, which are relatively safer.

There have been increasing refusals in Sindh witnessed particularly during the last year. Most of them came either from the Pakhtun families and a few districts, which have witnessed some militant attacks in the recent past.

Last year, total number of polio cases in Pakistan rose to 93 against 58 in 2012; the number of infected districts/towns/tribal agencies/ areas in the country was 20 as compared to 28 the preceding year.

This year some 42 cases have already been reported from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

“More than 90pc of the total polio cases are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” said a UNICEF report.

In Sindh, Karachi is the place with greater concern for the authorities, where too Gadap and Baldia towns are the areas where positive samples were still surfacing.