KARACHI: The Emergency Operation Centre for Polio in Sindh will launch the first anti-polio campaign of year 2018 in provincial capital from today (Monday). The drive will continue till Friday, January 26. The campaign will be conducted in all 6 districts, 18 towns of the city and the target is to vaccinate approximately 2.4 million children under 5 years of age. “Around 12,000 teams will take part in the campaign and 5,000 police personnel will be providing security cover,” Coordinator EOC Sindh Fayaz Jatoi said in a statement. The total case count for polio in 2017 was 8 in Pakistan out of which 2 cases were from Karachi. “This is a historical low for the country and the province,” Jatoi added. In 2014 there were 306 cases of polio in Pakistan, in 2015 there were 54, in 2016 there were 20 and 2017 there were 8 cases in the country. In Sindh in 2014 there were 30 cases, in 2015 there were 12, in 2016 there were 8 and in 2017 there were 2 cases in the province which shows the process made in polio eradication. Coordinator EOC said that “we have come a long way to achieve historically low cases but more work needs to be done and we must improve further.” “The teams must continue their hard work and parents must come forward to vaccinate their children to save them from the scourge of polio. No child should suffer from a vaccine preventable disease and it is our collective responsibility to make sure all children are vaccinated so we have a healthy future for our generations, he added. Published in Daily Times, January 22nd 2018.