Anti-polio drive underway in Sindh amid security cover

The anti-polio drive kicked off on Tuesday (today) will continue for three days and is the fifth phase of the campaign, which was started in January this year.

Commissioner Karachi Asif Haider Shah initiated the anti-polio drive. Shah said that the sixth round of the anti-polio campaign will be held after Ramazan.

According to details, 2.2 million children in Karachi will be administered anti-polio drops whereas 8 million children across the province will be immunized from the disease.

More than 25,000 teams have been formed which will administer drops to children upto the age of five.

It should be noted that World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that the disease can be eradicated from Pakistan in a few months.

Efforts to get rid of the polio virus in Pakistan have been complicated in recent years, as the polio vaccination teams subjected to attacks by the militants who see the ‘Western conspiracy’ in polio immunization campaigns.

Pakistan’s polio cases are declining, with just 54 cases of the polio virus reported in the country last year, down by more than 80 percent from the year 2014, when the country suffered a large spike in the cases of the crippling disease.

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Government of Pakistan and the Japan International Cooperation Agency according to which Japan will provide about US $59 million as soft loan to Pakistan for eradication of polio.