also be taken against people who jeopardised the health of children of the whole country.
Two polio cases have emerged in the city one after the other since October.
The first polio case of the year in Karachi surfaced in Shafiq Colony of Gulberg town, near Sohrab Goth, when an 18-month-old girl tested positive for polio. The family, belonging to Waziristan, had hid the child when vaccinators had come to their door during the routine immunisation drives.
The second polio case emerged in another Pashtun family living in Sikandarabad area of Keamari town. However, the family said the child had been vaccinated at least nine times during routine and special vaccination drives in the area.
The town health officer’s report had stated the child to be weak and malnourished from repeated illnesses.
In lieu of this, the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) for Polio in Sindh plans to hold special “mop-up” vaccination drives in three union councils of Keamari and four union councils of Saddar Town between November 25 and 28. The campaign aspires to vaccinate around 54,517 children in these seven union councils.
According to an official of the EOC, the mop-up drive will be held in union councils 1,2 and 5 of Keamari and 4,9, 10 and 11 of Saddar Town.
However, city’s health officials expressed their dissatisfaction with the ongoing anti-polio efforts saying, that the immunisation drives were so frequent that it had irritated the parents to the extent of inciting refusals from them.
They claimed that due to too many successive campaigns, the rate of refusal by parents and hiding their children from vaccinators was on the rise, and in some cases the health workers were also found to have shown some dereliction towards their responsibilities.
“Some vaccinators complained they were being turned away by parents and asked what was the point of going to houses every other day. In some cases, parents hid their children as soon as they learnt a vaccination drive was going on in the area,” said a government official, requesting anonymity.
“Polio can be eradicated from Pakistan like smallpox but it can’t be done by forcing the vaccine onto people. All the stakeholders have to sit together again and chalk out a new strategy before the number of refusals and missed children gets too high to control.”
According to a report of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the current winter season which will last till March 2016, as the only window for Pakistan to be able to check the prevalence of polio in Pakistan. It warns that if this window of low-transmission season is missed, the next summer would wreck havoc to all the efforts which have so far been put into the eradication of polio from the country.