Pakistan: CM Sindh wants every child entering Sindh to get polio drops

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Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah has directed all health department officials to make sure that every child entering Sindh from Waziristan is administered polio drops.

Presiding over a meeting on the anti-polio strategy, Shah asked the officials to establish polio control rooms in each district. He also wants all IDPs to be registered by the district administration at the border, along with data on the number of children and family statuses.

“There is a dire need to set up a provincial emergency operation centres for polio eradication and make it functional as soon as possible,” said the chief minister. “The police and law enforcement agencies must provide full security to the polio teams while they are in the field.”

The officials must conduct an extensive anti-polio campaign, especially in the vulnerable areas of Karachi, to avoid any further spread of crippling disease of Polio in the city and province, Shah added.

The officials informed the CM that strict checking has been ordered at all the entry points of the borders and cities in the province to ensure that neither the children of actual IDPs nor any others can pass without taking the polio drops.

Shah feared that several displaced persons and families are moving from North Waziristan as the armed forces carry out Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Most of the children accompanying these families have never been vaccinated and they are posing a threat. Seven cases this year

The coordinator of polio oversight committee, Shahnaz Wazir Ali, told the participants of the meeting that seven polio cases have emerged so far this year. All these cases were reported from Karachi and the victims belong to Pakhtun families, except for one child who belongs to a Punjabi family. The union councils from where these cases have emerged are on the top of the priority list and special attention is being paid to such vulnerable areas, she added.

“In addition to the deployment of 28 anti-polio teams on the Sindh-Punjab and Sindh-Balochistan borders, more than 166 teams are working at all the transits points of the cities, airports, railway stations, and toll plazas to administer polio drops to each child up to five years old,” she explained. The provincial focal person for polio, Dr Ahmed Ali Shaikh, told the participants of the meeting that two anti-polio campaigns will be conducted in Karachi; the first one from July 5 to July 8 and the second one from July 17 to July 20. As many as 153,564 children will be vaccinated in each round.

A total of 194 anti-polio teams have been deployed at all the transit points in the province including the borders of Sindh, said Dr Shaikh. Between April 2012 and April 2014, as many as 5,828,520 children have been vaccinated at all transit points in Sindh and 264,129 children have been vaccinated at the transit points in Karachi.