KARACHI: Hundreds of police commandos and thousands of police officials will be protecting volunteers of three-day anti-polio campaign in the city, its western fringes in particular, scheduled to begin next week.

Officials in the health department said on Wednesday that the department had got a nod from the provincial police department to launch from Monday the campaign, which was part of special measures being taken by the authorities concerned to minimise the frequency and intensity of the crippling disease for which the country faced travel sanctions imposed by international health regulators.

What perturbs the authorities more is the fact that the number of polio cases is significantly high even after the WHO-imposed sanctions that could make it difficult for the country to win a review scheduled by the end of this year.

Officials in Islamabad have already asked all the provinces to explain reasons behind persistent increase in polio cases across the country. The four provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) recorded polio cases in varying numbers over the past 80 days since the WHO imposed travel restrictions on the country for bearing a heavy burden of all the cases of the crippling disease recorded in the world.

Officials said since June 1, when the WHO sanctions came into effect, Pakistan has recorded 36 polio cases with, as was feared, the FATA remaining the major contributor to the disease with 23 cases.

Reports said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded seven polio cases, Sindh five and Punjab and Balochistan one case each after the WHO sanctions came into effect, which required all international passengers to get inoculated and obtain a vaccination card before leaving abroad.

Officials said that almost 80 per cent of the cases in the FATA were reported from the North Waziristan Agency (NWA), the troubled tribal region, where polio workers could go in June 2012 last time to administer vaccine to the children aged less than five.

After the military operation launched two months ago in the NWA, a large population has displaced and taken shelter in various parts of the country including Karachi.

Some special campaigns had been launched in the districts bordering the rugged region to target the children who missed vaccine for so long. Besides, similar campaigns had been organised in the four provinces for the internally displaced people.

Although, results of some previous drives failed to rein in the spread of the disease in the metropolis, which recorded 10 out of 11 cases in Sindh, the officials are hopeful that such campaigns could attain positive results if they were carried out regularly.

Some representatives of the United Nations Department for Safety and Security (UNDSS) and WHO, who lately visited some senior police officials, got assurances that the department would extend full-scale support to polio teams.

Officials in the police said they had received orders from the top to depute additional contingents for the security of polio workers.

The city’s western district which has been by far the most volatile area in respect of emergence of confirmed polio cases and security concerns, officials said up to 150 police commandos (rapid reaction force) and around 1,200 policemen will be deputed for the campaign to provide security to the hundreds of teams for three days.

In the remaining five districts, thousands of policemen would be there to safeguard the polio teams.

Pakistan regularly recorded over 2,500 polio cases a year till 1993. Some 1,147 cases were reported in 1997 before figures receded to satisfactory limits. 198 cases in 2011 was the world’s highest and 117 cases so far this year is again the highest in the world.

Barring a two-year-old child from a village in Sanghar district, the rest of 10 polio cases have been reported from Karachi and eight of them belonged to the families of Pakhtun origin, the community that records most refusals for their doubts over the vaccination.

The community’s suspicions were strengthened particularly after the use of a doctor in a CIA-sponsored fake vaccination campaign during the agency’s hunt for Osama bin Laden three years ago.

Karachi – which was polio free in 2012 – had seen eight victims last year and officials fear the number of affected children could be much higher as it is just eighth month of the year.

Polio vaccination has attained even more importance in the wake of the travel restrictions imposed by the WHO on the country.

Polio workers have repeatedly come under attacks in Gadap town in recent years, compelling the authorities to suspend the immunisation campaigns quite often in the area and some other volatile areas of the city.

On Jan 21, 2014, three polio workers, two of them women, were killed in Qayyumabad.

While Sindh government initially ordered the law-enforcement agencies to provide security to polio workers during such campaigns, most such drives have been put off for want of security as the government’s real priorities lie somewhere else.

Pakistan now carries a huge burden of 117 polio cases: 85 from the FATA, 19 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 11 from Sindh and one each from Balochistan and Punjab.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2014