ISLAMABAD: Ahead of a national immunisation campaign in February, the first case of polio in the year 2020 has been reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The victim is a 12-month-old boy, a resident of Lakki Marwat district’s Serae Naurang tehsil of Union Council Bakhmal Ahmadzai.

“Samples were collected on January 3 as the child’s lower limbs were paralysed. The socioeconomic status of child’s family has been declared poor,” an official of the polio programme said, requesting anonymity.

According to officials of the polio programme, the immunity gap that emerged across the country in the year 2019 shall be plugged through two nationwide polio campaigns in the next three months.

“The national campaign is planned for February 2020. Considering comparatively higher concentration of overt and covert refusal clusters in the district, in addition to other measures, the targeted grass root community engagement activities were being implemented ahead of each polio campaign,” he said.

National Emergency Polio Programme Coordinator Dr Rana Safdar, while speaking to Dawn, said that South KP had been the epicentre of 2019 outbreaks largely due to significant clustering of missed children owing to various misconceptions.

“As we began a series of campaigns from December, the targeted community engagement through identified influencers is one specific strategy being implemented here. Instead of forced vaccination, our aim here is to let communities express their concerns and questions that we address based on logic and science using people that these communities trust. The goal is to promote immunisation against all vaccine preventable diseases as it is also a zone with the lowest routine immunization coverage within KP,” he said.

He said that there would be two nationwide campaigns in February and April 2020 as well as two calculated response rounds in January and March.

“The efforts would lead to significant drop in pace of new cases by mid 2020 to push the cases to zero. The programme expects support from all segments of society and requests every Pakistani to assume the role of Sehat Muhafiz for vaccinating own children as well as those around them,” Dr Safdar said.

It is worth mentioning that as many as 136 cases of polio were reported in the year 2019 as compared to 12 cases in 2018 and only 8 cases in 2017.

Published in Dawn, January 21st, 2020