Anti-polio vaccination drive kicks off

Karachi Commissioner Dr Sohail Rajput inaugurated an oral polio vaccine (OPV) campaign by administering vaccine drops to children at a rural health centre in Badla Town, urging the parents to get their children vaccinated to protect them from the crippling disease.

The province-wide campaign will continue till September 27 in all the 29 districts with a target population of 9,148,355 children under five years of age, of whom more than 2.2 million children reside in Karachi.

Over 50,000 polio workers have been deployed in the province for house-to-house vaccination, while 5,000 personnel from law enforcement agencies will provide security cover. The commissioner said these campaigns were of the utmost importance, and the parents must give children the oral vaccine to save them from polio and to ensure a healthy future for them.

Pakistan is one of the two polio-endemic countries in the world, apart from Afghanistan, and has so far reported 73 cases, 22 of them in Sindh, this year. The commissioner said it was absolutely necessary that children received these life-saving vaccines and also completed their routine immunisation.