PESHAWAR: An eight-day anti-polio drive is beginning in Fata and frontier regions today (Monday), where the children would be given both the oral and injectable vaccines.

The first three days of the drive would be used for oral polio vaccination (OPV), while the rest would include inactivated polio vaccine (IPV).

The polio drive will cover all the seven agencies of Fata, and Frontier Regions of Peshawar, Kohat, Tank, Lakki Marwat, DI Khan and Bannu, according to a statement issued here on Sunday.

The children, who didn’t get drops in the previous campaign, would be focused during the current drive.

The IPV would be administered to 164,589 children aged between four to 23 months, while 200,589 children below four months of age would receive OPV.

Administration of IPV had helped reduce polio cases in Fata, and only two cases were reported, last year. The campaign aimed to maintain the “zero case” status for the current year, said the statement.

The statement said 99 per cent of the targeted children had been given IPV in the first round of the campaign, last month.

It said that IPV scaled up immunity level of the recipients who stayed safe from the infection for a long period.

The statement asked the parents to ensure that their children got the required dose of vaccine to protect them from polio that caused disabilities but was preventable through immunisation.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2017