KARACHI: Provincial health authorities are all set to inoculate some 7.6 million children of Sindh with polio vaccine from Monday as part of a nationwide drive that will continue till Thursday, officials said.They said they would try not to repeat the dismal performance in Karachi they recorded in the past such campaign, which started in November and lasted for more than a month for a host of reasons, particularly because of a lack of security.
The children of Sindh will be among the over 33m Pakistani children who will be administered with anti-polio vaccine during the National Immunisation Days (NIDs), scheduled to continue till Jan 23.
“We have made all arrangements to inoculate the city’s children with the rest of the province and the country during the NIDs,” said Dr Zafar Ijaz, the executive district officer (health) in the city.
An official of the provincial expanded programme on immunisation restated with a similar claim, but was little confident when asked if they were able to defy the persistent violence in the city to achieve that goal.
Dr Ijaz said there were some areas, particularly in the Gadap, Baldia and Gulshan-i-Iqbal neighbourhoods, which had historically been termed ‘sensitive’ because of greater resistance from their Pakhtun-dominated population.
“But we are confident that we’ll get over that this time as per schedule,” he said.
The above mentioned areas have been volatile in the past where polio workers and doctors had been attacked several times, leading to cancellation of polio campaigns.
A security official said that of the around 2.26m children of Karachi about half a million might miss out in the campaign’s scheduled days because of the law and order situation and increasing attacks on security agencies. However, they would be immunised in the ‘silent days’ with little publicity and when adequate security would be available after a greater part of the city was covered.
“We can’t say the entire metropolis would be covered this time round. We are going to do it in phases as we did in the past to protect our teams, particularly in several vulnerable areas,” said a senior official.
Sindh was detected with nine confirmed polio cases last year — seven in Karachi with four in Gadap alone. With seven cases reported from Punjab, the situation in the country’s northwest is the worst where 85 polio cases were documented last year. Lately, the World Health Organisation described Peshawar as the world’s largest polio pool as most samples in its sewers were detected with poliovirus.
Polio campaigns had been abruptly ended in Karachi more than once after attacks on a WHO doctor and several polio vaccinators last year.
In a botched attack on the police guarding polio teams in Gadap on Dec 17, 2013 an attacker was killed and another was arrested.
A year before the same day, a young volunteer associated with the anti-polio campaign was shot dead in the same area in a third such attack in the neighbourhood on polio workers in 2012, stopping the three-day anti-polio campaign in the most volatile union council 4.
Karachi is the city where health officials have recorded most refusals to the immunisation campaign (over 16,000) in August than other large cities of the country.
There have been increasing refusals in Sindh witnessed particularly during the last year. Most of them came either from Pakhtun families and a few districts, which have witnessed some militant attacks in the recent past.
The last national immunisation drive was in November, in which there were 30,231 refusals at the outset, of which the teams managed to convert 14,589.
As many as 745 polio cases have been detected during the last 17 years in Sindh, official figures show.
The NIDs campaigns were started in 1994 to eradicate the lethal disease. The year 2012 showed the best result for the provincial anti-polio campaigners yet it crippled four children.
According to the WHO, around 10 per cent of Pakistani children miss out on polio vaccination in nationwide campaigns.
According to the micro plan chalked out by the organisers, some 7.6m children have been identified to be administered with polio drops by 21,921 teams during the NIDs.