PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government administered oral polio vaccine (OPV) to over 500,000 children in Peshawar on Sunday, officials said.
A total of 12,000 health workers took part in the campaign conducted in 60 union councils of the provincial metropolis.
The officials said that 5,000 policemen provided security to the vaccinators on the second Sunday of ‘Sehat Ka Insaf’ programme of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) led provincial government in areas that were listed in high-risk category in the past.
“We have achieved a record success mainly due to political ownership of the immunisation programme by the PTI-led government,” the officials said.
The campaign will be run for 12 Sundays to administer OPV to children repeatedly. The sources said that the province had seen assassination of 20 vaccinators in past 19 months, but hoped that the prevalent fear among the health workers and volunteers was fading away due to the full support of the government as well as the PTI workers. The PTI workers organised camps in their respective areas to ensure vaccination of children.
They officials said that it was the biggest ever immunisation campaign in the country. They said that the campaign had attracted people, who were previously suspicious about the anti-polio campaigns, mainly due to participation of political workers.
“We have provided vaccination to 521,000 children of the 550,000 target children, which is a record,” they said.
The officials said that some 2,700 parents showed defiance against vaccination while over 22,000 children remained unimmunised due to their unavailability at homes.
They said that Peshawar had recorded between 6,000 and 8,000 refusals in the previous vaccination campaigns, while the number of missed children stood at 80,000 then.
“Selection of Sundays for the current campaigns has helped a great deal as we have been able to find children at their homes. Previously, the campaigns were carried out on working days due to which the children used to be in schools or away and could not be reached,” they added.
The officials also said that they had distributed over 150,000 dengue awareness brochures at the doorsteps of people. “We are now using the door-to-door visits to scale up public awareness of preventable ailments.
” They said that the vaccinators had also handed over 12,000 hygiene kits to households in Shaheen Muslim Town on Sunday last, and 9,000 kits, each including four bath soaps, two towels, two water containers and one bucket, to the residents in Larama and Akhunabad today (Feb 9).
Talking to Dawn, the PTI leaders gave credit to the party’s Tabdeeli Razakaars for the successful campaign and said that the programme would be replicated in other districts of the province after three months.
They said that PTI chairman Imran Khan, who inaugurated the ‘Sehat Ka Insaf’ programme last month, had asked the government as well as the party workers to spearhead the campaign.
“Imran Khan is deeply concerned about the presence of polio and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” they said.
Our correspondent adds from Khar: The local administration has finalised arrangements for the three-day anti-polio campaign starting from Monday (today), during which about 223,900 children would be vaccinated.
In this connection, an inaugural ceremony was held here the other day which was chaired by Bajaur Agency political agent Abdul Jabar Shah and attended by senior officials of the health department and local administration, WHO representatives, tribal elders and social activists.