Polio: Virus confirmed in infant from Lakki Marwat

The Express Tribune

The National Institute of Health in Islamabad confirmed a fresh case of polio in an 11-month-old child, increasing the number of cases in the country to 58. The report issued from the Prime Minister’s Polio Monitoring and Coordination Cell said that the virus has been found in an infant, Muhammad Shehzad, resident of Mohallah Michan Khel, union council City-2, Lakki Marwat. This is the third case to be reported in the district. According to the report, the stool sample of the child was collected on November 30, 2012 and the diagnosis made on January 3. Therefore, this case will be recorded in last year’s data and not as the first case of this year. The report further states that the child only received one polio vaccine dose through Short Interval Activities (SIA) as he had missed vaccination during the earlier campaign. SIA is an approach to administer two successive doses within a period of two weeks and is usually carried out later, for children who missed the earlier campaigns. “All the vaccination rounds were conducted using vaccine containing component against type-1 poliovirus” the report says. It adds that Independent Monitoring Board of Global Polio Eradication assessed 95% of the Union Councils as vaccinated; however, evaluation by the local cell records a higher percentage. Technical focal person for Polio Eradication Cell at the Chief Minister Secretariat, Dr Imtiaz Ali Shah told The Express Tribune, “The affected child has received seven doses, not in routine campaigns but in SIAs and the area where he lives is not included in the high-risk councils but there are other reasons of contracting the virus.” He added there was a chance that the child was malnourished, had diarrhoea and low immunity levels and the water in his area is contaminated. “In these conditions the vaccine will not save the child from contracting the crippling disease” Dr Shah said. There are now 58 cases in the country, 27 are from K-P, 20 from FATA, four each in Balochistan and Sindh, two in Punjab and one in Gilgit-Baltistan. KP govt to set up Polio Control Room in PDMA office The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government has decided to establish a Chief Secretary Polio Control Room in the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) office to provide information and monitor related activities. According to an official notification, Mohammad Zubair will be the designated in-charge of the newly created control room. The office will collect data from all districts during the preparatory phase of polio campaigns and record its activities. The post-campaign assessment result of the entire province will be relayed to the chief secretary and secretary health of K-P.