ISLAMABAD, May 9: Health Minister Nasir Khan said on Tuesday that the government would have no difficulty distributing polio vaccines in its troubled tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, as it launched a campaign to immunise 16.5 million children.

About 60,000 workers have begun administering polio vaccine drops to children under five, Mr Khan said.

The three-day campaign began a day after neighbouring Afghanistan started immunising two million children on the frontier.

“The World Health Organisation is helping our immunisation effort which covers about 16.5 million children,” the minister told a press conference.

“There is no problem in vaccinating children in tribal areas. These areas are part of our country and we have full support of (the) provincial government and local authorities in these areas,” the minister said.

The army has been battling Al Qaeda and pro-Taliban militants in the northwestern tribal belt for the past three years.

More than half a million of those waiting to be vaccinated are in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, said the WHO, which is working in tandem with the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“We are focussing on 49 districts and three of them are in the tribal areas,” WHO representative in Pakistan Khalif Bile told AFP.

Meanwhile in Balochistan province, which also borders Afghanistan, rumours were rife that the polio vaccine drops contained drugs which make children infertile when they grow up, officials said.

“There were rumours that polio vaccination drive was a ploy for birth control, but we brought the clerics on board and removed this misconception,” provincial Health Minister Hafiz Hamadullah told the same press conference.

Pakistan is one of four nations where polio is still endemic, along with India, Nigeria and Afghanistan, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative spearheaded by the WHO.

There have been two cases of the crippling and potentially lethal disease in Pakistan so far this year and another six in Afghanistan, according to the UN health agency.

The campaign will continue until no more polio cases are reported for three consecutive years.—AFP