MUZAFFARABAD, Nov 13: Doctors in quake-stricken Azad Kashmir have begun a campaign to immunise 800,000 children against potentially killer diseases before the bitter winter.

Immunisation will be against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. Children living in remote mountain villages, cut off by landslides, were particularly vulnerable due to malnutrition.

“We’re doing everything we can to immunise every child in the region,” Dr Tamur Mueenuddin, in charge of health issues for UNICEF in Muzaffarabad, told Reuters in the ruined capital of Azad Kashmir on Sunday.

“The target is to immunise 800,000 children. We want to vaccinate them in the next two weeks’, weather permitting, before people get into close quarters in camps.”

The campaign was led by the health authorities, and while an immunisation programme for measles, with a Vitamin A supplement, had already been under way it was decided to accelerate efforts, both in Azad Kashmir and North West Frontier Province — the other badly hit area in Pakistan.

Dr Gulshan Rasheed, Assistant Project Officer, said the drive would cost five million rupees, and the expense was largely being borne by Unicef with help from the United Arab Emirates government.

Mueenuddin said one 15-strong medical team had been flown by helicopter into the cut off valleys around Muzaffarabad, and others were following.

“The plan is that they will reside there for a few days, and then walk from village to village, vaccinating every child they come across.”

POTENTIAL FOR DISEASE: Over 75,000 people, mostly in Azad Kashmir, were killed in the Oct 8 quake, and aid agencies have voiced fears that the winter could bring a second wave of death through cold and disease unless survivors receive food and shelter.—Reuters