QUETTA: Despite the tall claims by the provincial government regarding eradication of polio, majority of children in Balochistan remain deprived of basic immunisation facilities, as 300 out of the total 688 Union Councils in the province have no vaccination centre, a health department official told DawnNews on Monday.
The Balochistan government has repeatedly declared that education and health were among its top priorities. However, lack of vaccination centres in most parts of the province's far-flung areas has made majority of the children vulnerable to preventable life-threatening diseases.
Provincial health secretary Noorul Haq Baloch said, "Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri has approved the establishment of 300 vaccination centres across the province to improve the availability of immunisation facilities to everyone."
"Diarrhoea, measles, tetanus and six other diseases are taking the lives of a large number of children in Balochistan. The government had allocated Rs180 million for establishment of Extended Programme for Immunisation (EPI) to ensure basic immunisation facilities in the province," Noorul Haq Baloch said.
"But hardly 200 vaccination centres are fully functional", the officer stated adding that most of EPI centres in in Killa Abdullah district were dysfunctional.
According to a recently released report of Pakistan Demographic Health Survey, there had been 2,821 refusal cases during a polio campaign launched in the province last month.
Related: Polio virus still active in parts of Balochistan
Around 15,232 other children did not receive polio drops because they were not available when vaccinators visited their homes. The cases of refusal were high in Quetta as compared to other parts of the province.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world which have not been able to eradicate the polio-virus while no case of polio virus was reported in Nigeria over a year.
