KARACHI, Dec 7: Figures of refusals encountered during nationwide polio campaign held last month in certain districts of Sindh with the districts plagued by serious security concerns having relatively high number of refusals have left senior provincial authorities baffled, it emerged on Friday.

According to figures compiled by the provincial health department, the polio teams faced thousands of refusals, particularly in the districts in the northern part of Sindh.

“We have recorded some 23,723 refusals from across the province barring Karachi, which is much higher than what our teams normally record,” a senior health ministry official said while speaking to Dawn.

The figures were corroborated with the record maintained by the expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of Sindh, which is chiefly responsible for launching and supervising polio campaigns.

Health ministry officials said most refusals came from Shikarpur, Kashmore and a number of other districts in the upper Sindh. Jamshoro was the only central district, which highlighted with refusals during the campaign, they said.

“Our figures show that an increasing number of families are refusing to our teams to inoculate their children, particularly in Shikarpur and Kashmore,” said a health official.

Explaining the cause behind a few hundred refusals recorded in Jamshoro, he said that they were from a certain cluster of population mostly comprising Pakhtun families who, like the country’s northwest and Karachi, refrained from cooperating with volunteers.

However, in upper Sindh, the refusals came from native Sindhi families, officials said, adding that out of seven polio cases so far detected in the province, four children belonged to Pakhtun families – all in Karachi – and three were from Sindhi families – one each from Karachi, Dadu and Kashmore districts.

Officials in the provincial home department said the polio refusals were increasing in the districts which had been bracketed as ‘sensitive’ for worsening security situation.

“Religious extremism in Shikarpur and some other districts of upper Sindh is on an alarming increase, which may have caused increase in the refusals,” the official said.

He said Shikarpur was now considered as the district with ‘worst’ security conditions in Sindh after Karachi and cited several militant attacks, including a few suicide bombings, which wracked the district over the past few years.

The latest was a suicide attack in May on an election convoy of a leader of the National Peoples Party, Dr Ibrahim Jatoi, which left may injured. Dr Jatoi’s party has now been merged into the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

The Taliban in 2010 claimed responsibility for one of several attacks on Nato oil tankers in the same district in which 27 tankers had been burnt.

In February, two people were killed and a dozen others injured in an attack on shrine of Hajjan Shah a week after an attack on a religious scholar in neighbouring Jacobabad district.

Health officials said last year, the refusals in Karachi were the highest among all large cities of the country but in the rest of Sindh they were acceptably low.

“We have recommended to the government to take it seriously and tackle it by taking administrative action through community involvement, otherwise, the trend could tarnish beyond repair the image of our province as the land of Sufis,” said an official.

EPI officials said the polio campaign, which was launched on Nov 18 for four days, had not yet come to end in Karachi and there were still many ‘sensitive’ localities to be covered.

The delay has been caused by a host of reasons, mainly the worsening law and order situation and VVIP movement, which left the police force too busy to provide escort to vulnerable polio teams.

So far, officials said, they had received just 284 refusals from its teams. In an earlier campaign, number of refusals in Karachi was more than 16,000, which was more than 60pc of all Sindh’s refusals. “Once the campaign is concluded, we will be in a position to vet the number of refusals in the city,” an official said.

The detection of three polio cases in less than a month lately prompted the health officials to ask the government to declare a ‘polio emergency’ in Sindh.

Polio campaigns had to be stopped abruptly in Karachi more than once after attacks on a WHO doctor and several polio vaccinators last year. As many as 743 polio cases have been detected over the past 17 years in Sindh, say official figures.

The national polio immunisation days (NIDs) campaigns were started in 1994 to eradicate the lethal disease. Last year showed the best result for the provincial anti-polio campaigners but for four children who fell victim to the crippling disease.