KARACHI, July 12: About 1,000 centres dedicated to polio and other routine vaccinations of children under the age of five years will be established in private clinics in the city in collaboration with the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), Sindh, and the Unicef.

This was stated by the EPI Sindh project director, Dr Salma Kauser Ali, on Thursday. She was talking to a group of journalists at a polio vaccination centre set up at a hospital in North Nazimabad Town in connection with the 70th round of the three-day anti-polio campaign which ended in the city on Thursday.

The project director said that the EPI had negotiated with the associations of general physicians for allocation of some space and staff in private clinics for the establishment of vaccination centres where children could be vaccinated against polio and other preventable diseases for free.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) would be signed soon in order to launch the public-private partnership aimed at improving the routine immunisation vaccine coverage and eliminate the polio virus from the province, she added.

She said that based on the experience of the project to be launched initially in Karachi; doctors working in the private sector in other parts of the province would also be approached.

Under the plan, according to Dr Salma, private general physicians would have to provide cold-chain as well for scientific storage of the vaccines, while the Unicef and the EPI Sindh would ensure training of the staff concerned and supply of vaccines.

About 350 vaccination centres in the government sector were already working as free vaccination facilities and with the proposed private centre scheme the access of general public to free vaccination would further be increased, she concluded.