KARACHI: The city made history on Monday when it completed a year without reporting a single case of poliovirus, health department officials told Dawn.

“This is the first time in its history that Karachi hasn’t reported a single case the whole year. Fortunately, the reports of samples collected from various drains in the city have repeatedly come negative the whole year,” said coordinator for emergency operation centre, Sindh, Fayyaz Jatoi, adding that the city was close to eradicating the crippling disease.

According to him, the last polio case in Karachi was reported on Jan 16, 2016.

The city with a high population density, he pointed out, represented a major challenge to health officials and the development was a ‘great success’.

‘We have to win the war against the disease and gear up efforts’

“Once the virus goes into the body, it multiplies into millions and is discharged from the body through human waste. It’s a major achievement given the kind of sewerage system we have,” he said.

The anti-polio campaign which kicked off on Monday, he said, was part of a country-wide drive and in all districts in the province except Kamber-Shahdadkot, where staff faced problems in their movement owing to rains.

“There are a total of 30,000 mobile teams, of them around 12,000 are stationed in Karachi. All the 188 union councils of Karachi would be covered in phases in three to four days,” he said.

On refusal, he said that the internally displaced persons residing in UC-12 of Gulshan-i-Iqbal were reluctant to have their children vaccinated. “The deputy commissioner intervened in the case and talked to them. They have agreed to have their children, around 800 to 900 in number, vaccinated on Tuesday,” he said.

The number of refusals, according to him, has gone down drastically over the years. The reasons behind refusals mainly include misperceptions about the vaccine.

Last year, 19 polio cases were reported in the country; of them eight each were reported in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkha. There was no case in Punjab while the remaining three cases were reported in Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

During the present campaign, a total of 8.3 million children in the province (2.2m in Karachi) would be vaccinated.

Meanwhile, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Mural Ali Shah reiterated the commitment of his government to protect children from the crippling disease and said that the government would take every step to achieve zero polio prevalence during the current year.

“Though the number of polio cases has declined, we have to win the war against the disease and gear up efforts,” he said.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2017