PESHAWAR: Despite utilising all available options for polio eradication, the crippling disease paralysed four more children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as the total number of cases to 98 in Pakistan and 72 in the province.
The National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) in Peshawar on Thursday confirmed the latest four polio cases. Three were reported from Lakki Marwat and one from the adjoining Tank district.
The government is set to launch a three-day anti-polio campaign in the province today (Friday). Chief Secretary Dr Kazim Niaz would launch the polio eradication campaign by administering anti-polio vaccines to children at the Police Hospital in Peshawar.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) laboratory in Islamabad has isolated wild poliovirus from stool samples of three-month boy and 11-month girl of Sarai Naurang Tehsil and 11-month old girl from Deratang union council in Lakki Marwat district and 12-month female child from Waraspoon union council of Tank district.
The EOC officials, while quoting parents of the threeaffected children in Lakki Marwat, claimed that none of them had essential immunisation or polio vaccine administered in recent month.
However, the child diagnosed with polio in Tank has had three doses of routine immunisation, but not IPV. The southern districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have become the most difficult places for health workers engaged in the fight against polio.
In KP, Bannu district with 24 polio cases is on top, followed by Lakki Marwat with 22. According to official sources and health workers, millions of rupees had been spent just for creating awareness among the parents, mostly illiterate, regarding polio.
Officials of the programme believe that the fake campaign conducted by Dr Shakil Afridi in Abbottabad to help the American CIA reach al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 caused “irreparable loss” to all the immunisation initiatives in Pakistan.
Though Dr Shakil Afridi had conducted the fake campaign for hepatitis, it was reported initially that he had used polio drive to trace bin Laden and his family.
Had major health organisations such as World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef reacted immediately at the time and denied reports of polio campaign being used for spying purposes, it would have controlled further damage to the immunisation.