KARACHI: The Sindh health department has identified 41 high-risk areas in the city — all predominantly Pakhthun localities — for which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has agreed to provide 700 female vaccinators belonging to the same community, officials said on Wednesday.

They said out of 41 high-risk union councils, eight were ‘super high-risk’ UCs — three of which were in Gadap Town, where eight out of 16 polio cases of Karachi had been confirmed.

“The WHO has agreed to provide 700 local Pakhtun women volunteers on a permanent basis to help us reach the virtually inaccessible predominantly Pakhtun neighbourhoods and get the children who had missed out in campaigns inoculated,” said Khalid Shaikh, special secretary in the provincial health department.

The officials said the WHO would bear all the expenses of the female Pakhtun volunteers and they would be at the disposal of the expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of Sindh permanently.

“Security for immunisation campaigns is a big issue and it gets bigger in the neighbourhoods where Pakhtuns are in majority,” said Mr Shaikh.

Officials said it would be much easier for Pashto speakers to blend in the Pakhtun population because of same culture and language and that could come in handy while convincing the community to get their children vaccinated against polio because a large number of them had normally refused vaccination.

They said the number of refusals during anti-polio campaigns had been on the rise in Pakhtun localities, a matter of concern for the government, which had been promising throughout the year that the crippling disease would be eradicated from Sindh by 2015.

“Though it is highly difficult to root out polio in a year, at least we are doing our best to get it as minimised and restricted as possible,” said a senior official in the health department.

Apart from introducing Pakhtun volunteers, the government is working on several other projects to reach out to maximum number of people during its future campaigns and misgivings about polio campaigns that grew a great deal after a the CIA-sponsored fake polio campaign in 2011 that was designed to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

One such measure is the formation of a provincial scholars’ task force — a scheme to be assisted by religious scholars to convince the people, who refused polio teams to inoculate their children, to change their views.

Polio campaign

A three-day national immunisation days (NIDs) campaign came to an end in Karachi’s west, central and south districts on Wednesday.

The officials termed the campaign a ‘success’ and said a similar three-day campaign would begin in the city’s remaining districts of Malir, Korangi and east after Eid.

A special two-day campaign will be launched on Thursday in 14 high-risk union councils of the city.

According to deputy commissioner of central Dr Syed Saifur Rehman, about 350,000 children under five years of age were administered polio drops during the three days.

He said the campaign remained ‘a success’ across the 42 union councils of the district in which 1,158 polio teams took part.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2014