KARACHI: Another child — eighth in Karachi and ninth in Sindh this year — was confirmed to have contracted the crippling poliovirus on Saturday in the city’s Gadap Town, officials said.

This is the fourth polio case so far this year in Gadap.

The 21-month-old son of Zabi Ullah, Hamza, was among the five children from across the country whose samples had been sent to the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, for examination, which confirmed it after three weeks.

Year’s fourth polio case in Gadap confirmed

The officials in the expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of Sindh said that Hamza’s family lived in UC-8 in Sector-3 in Sultanabad near Manghopir in Gadap town in Karachi.

“He was allowed to be administered with polio vaccine just for once in the past six months. Previously too he was among the children whose families stubbornly denied him from being vaccinated,” said Dr Durre Naz Jamal, deputy director in the EPI Sindh.

The family belonged to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and officials here are investigating whether they had recently visited the restive region.

Other children included two from North Waziristan Agency (NWA), where a large population has got displaced after a military operation against militants has been launched.

One each belongs to South Waziristan Agency and Lakki Marwat.

All those cases, including Karachi’s Hamza, were primarily caused by the non-administration of the polio vaccine either because of the family’s refusal or, in the NWA case, polio vaccinators were not able reach to them because of security impediments.

Barring a two-year-old child from a village of Sanghar district, the rest of the eight polio cases have been reported from Karachi while seven of them belonged to the families of Pakhtun origin — the community which records most refusals for their doubts over the vaccination on, as officials claimed, ‘baseless grounds’.

The community’s suspicions grew gravely particularly after the use of a doctor in a CIA-sponsored fake vaccination campaign launched to hunt down Osama bin Laden three years ago.

Since June 1 when the World Health Organisation (WHO) imposed travel restrictions on Pakistan for its staggeringly high contribution to the polio cases in the world, the country has recorded 18 polio cases out of which three have been reported in Sindh.

The city of Karachi — which was polio free in 2012 — saw eight polio cases throughout the past year and officials fear the number of affected children could be much higher this year as it is just the seventh month of the year.

Pakistan now carries a huge burden of 99 polio cases.

An official in the prime minister’s polio cell said the child’s stool samples were sent to the NIH three weeks ago, from where they got confirmation on Saturday.

The officials in the city and provincial health departments are said to be extremely worried with the frequency with which polio cases are surfacing in the city.

Four of eight cases in Karachi have been reported in Gadap alone, while one each belonged to Baldia, Orangi, SITE and Korangi. Apart from Korangi all the cases have been reported from the city’s western fringes.

Polio vaccination has attained even more importance in the wake of the travel restrictions imposed by the WHO on the country.

Polio workers have repeatedly come under attacks in Gadap town in recent years, compelling the authorities to suspend the immunisation campaigns quite often in Gadap and some other areas of the city.

While the Sindh government initially ordered the law-enforcement agencies to provide security to polio workers during such campaigns, most such drives were put off for want of security as the government’s real priorities looked to be lying somewhere else.

On Jan 21, 2014, three polio workers, two of them female, were killed in Qayyumabad.

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2014