Daily Times

PESHAWAR: A five-day polio eradication drive will be launched in 16 high-risk districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) on August 6 which will administer oral polio vaccine drops to nearly 3,627,000 children, the provincial health minister said on Friday.

Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a crippling and potentially deadly infectious disease, caused by the poliovirus, which affects mostly children under the age of five. The virus can spread from one person to another, and can invade an infected person’s brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis.

However, it can be prevented through vaccination.

In Peshawar alone, the KP’s health ministry will administer polio drops to 816,000 minors.

13 teams have been formed to fulfil the task.

Meanwhile, the inauguration ceremony of the anti-polio campaign was held at the Naseerullah Khan Babar Memorial Hospital, which was attended by the deputy medical superintendent Dr Abdul Rauf Khattak, heart specialists and other concerned officers.

On August 2, the Punjab health department confirmed the presence of poliovirus in the city’s sewerage water after testing samples which were collected from outfall road on July 11.

Importantly, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) hopes to make polio the second disease ever eradicated with just three polio-endemic countries remaining in the world: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.

For that purpose, GPEI has been taking lessons from the aftermath of the smallpox eradication programme to ensure polio’s complete eradication from the world. The assets and knowledge accrued by such an effort would not be squandered once polio is finally defeated.

Pakistan has been striving for the last many years to defeat poliovirus.

In 2014, 306 people were infected with poliovirus, and the number declined to 54 cases in 2015, 20 in 2016 and eight in 2017.

In 2018, only three cases have been found so far – from Balochistan.

There must be no polio case for the three consecutive years in order for the World Health Organization (WHO) to certify polio’s global eradication.

According to the WHO, the number of polio cases ‘globally’ has fallen from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 22 in 2017.

Published in Daily Times, August 4^th 2018.