KARACHI: A week-long polio campaign in 51 union councils of the city began on Monday with no incident of violence reported from any neighbourhood on the first day of the drive, officials said.

They added that 2,743 teams with 642 area heads and around 2,000 police were deployed for the drive that would conclude on Saturday.

On the first day, the officials said, 98 per cent deployment had been made in all the 51 union councils by 9:15am.

The campaign has been designed particularly to cover the areas where the authorities found a surge in number of children who had missed vaccination during the previous drives.

The 51 UCs are part of 14 out of the city’s 18 towns. Eight of them are part of Baldia, six are in Landhi, five each in Gadap, Orangi and SITE, four each in Gulshan and North Karachi, three each in Bin Qasim, Korangi and Keamari, two in North Nazimabad and one each in Saddar, Gulberg and Liaquatabad.

The police authorities said they had ensure best possible security measures for the campaign, with deployment of police commandos in the ‘most sensitive’ localities.

Besides regular police patrol, random snap check and advanced intelligence collection system would be part of the immunisation drive that had suffered setbacks in the past due to attacks on polio workers.

Officials said the campaign would cover more than 865,000 children aged five or less in the areas where people refused to get their children vaccinated against the poliovirus.

In addition to the special week-long drive in Karachi, one-day sub-national supplementary immunisation campaign was launched on Monday in Sukkur, Larkana, Shikarpur, Khairpur, Qambar, Jacobabad, Ghotki and Kashmore districts.

Also, a six-day drive was launched for six days in several districts of Sindh spearheaded by community-based volunteers.

So far this year has witnessed four polio cases from Sindh; one each from Karachi and Jacobabad and two from Shikarpur district. “Now these districts are on the top of government’s polio effort,” said the officials.

They said the campaign was part of a series of drives, which the polio task force for Sindh had planned in a bid to fully eradicate the crippling disease at the earliest. They said steps were being taken to ensure that no child missed the drops this time for which close coordination with the communities would be developed.

A fresh micro-plan was being prepared, which would give updated picture about all the indicators and figures vis-a-vis the next polio campaigns, they added.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2016