DERA GHAZI KHAN, Oct 5: The 34th three-day anti-polio drive was launched on Tuesday with all shortcomings which have already been reported by the national press, teams of health department, WHO and different segments of public.

The main problem is the storage and transportation of polio drops which should be kept in refrigerators. Most of the health centres in the district were provided refrigerators by Unicef which are reportedly out of order now.

When a lady health visitor, in a monthly district level meeting, asked about the availability of vaccine boxes, member of district monitoring team Dr Noman assured her that they would be provided to them.

The other flaw which hampers the success of the campaign is the appointment of unqualified staff like ward servants and lady health supervisors as zonal and area incharges.

Senior surveillance officer Dr Khalid of WHO told the participants in the meeting that due to lack of required staff, the authorities had to appoint unqualified employees of the department as area incharge or zonal supervisors.

Another reason is that most of the population, about 200,000, lives in tribal area tehsil and could not be approached by the district health department. The tehsil is deprived of proper means of communication due to which provision of health facilities is a very hard task.

It was suggested that the health department should get the help of border military police in the polio eradication campaign as it had its network in the whole area. The BMP officials along with the health employees can dispense polio drops in the far flung and hard areas of the tehsil.

Meanwhile, residents of Bail Pathar of Tuman Buzdar of tribal area tehsil Kamal Khan, Mohammad Bakhsh and Allah Bakhsh claimed that polio eradication team never came there while three children Ghulam Mohammad, Abdullah and Gul Sher of Bail Pathar had become victim of polio.

When contacted, EDO (health) Dr Faiz Ali Jaskani said the anti-polio drive was going well in the district and claimed that Dera Ghazi Khan had become polio free as health department could not find even a single case of polio this year. However, district health officer Dr Rafique Khan, a couple days ago, told the press that 22 cases were reported in Dera.