KARACHI: As the city partially took part in the nationwide anti-polio campaign launched on Monday, it received confirmation of two more polio cases — a girl and a boy — from Gadap, officials said on Monday.

The new cases shot the polio tally to eight in Gadap out of 16 in Karachi and 17 across Sindh.

Officials in Islamabad and the provincial health department said the poliovirus crippled the 12-month-old girl, Bakht Bibi, from UC-4, Afghan Abadi village, Moosa Market, of Gadap. Samples taken from the girl had been sent four weeks ago to the National Institute of Health that confirmed polio on Monday.Two-year-old Ubaid is the other child from Gadap who has tested positive for poliovirus. The samples obtained from the resident of Junjar Goth, Madina Madressah, UC-5, had been sent to the NIH five weeks ago.

“In both cases,” said a senior official, “the children’s families denied them polio vaccination.”

Only last week a two-year-old boy from Liaquatabad had been detected with poliovirus.

Like many previous cases, the families of the two latest cases also are Pakhtun and originally hailed from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), where over 70 per cent of polio cases in the world have been detected this year.

As a Pakistani delegation is in London to attend a meeting of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) on Pakistan’s unacceptable polio burden on Tuesday (today), two new cases in Sindh — a tiny part of 10 fresh cases from the country — will weaken the country’s argument seeking an end to travel restrictions slapped on it by the World Health Organization in June.

Except a two-year-old child from a village of Sanghar district, the rest of the 16 polio cases have been reported in Karachi.

The city was polio free in 2012, but saw eight cases last year and officials fear that this year the number of affected children could be much higher as it is still the ninth month of the year.

Pakistan carries a burden of 184 polio cases: 127 from Fata, 33 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 17 from Sindh, five from Balochistan and two from Punjab.

Officials fear the pace with which polio cases were increasing, the current year could surpass the decade’s highest (198 cases), which was recorded in 2011.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2014