Govt gives countrywide polio workers raise on daily wage: sources

KARACHI: The government on Monday decided to raise daily wage of the workers busy in anti-polio vaccination by Rs100 which will make their remuneration Rs500 a day, ARY News reported.

Sources said the decision would be applicable to all the 0.2 million polio workers all over the country from February 1.

They said the raise had been given for the next three years.

The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) on Friday approved revised emergency plan for eradication of polio at a cost of 986.29 million US dollars.

Read More: Gang posing as polio workers attempt to enter house in Karachi

The polio eradication plan aims to end the disease through supplemental immunization, across the country and use of environmental surveillance to completely check polio virus transmission.

A fresh polio case was detected on January 10 in the Lakki Marwat area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

Babar Bin Atta, the focal person to prime minister on polio, confirmed that a 16 months old baby girl was infected with the polio virus. He told journalists that the symptoms of the disease appeared in the patients in December last year.

Babar Bin Atta said that the infant’s blood sample was sent to the National Institute of Health (NIH) Islamabad for confirmation of the virus. Later, the NIH confirmed detection of poliovirus in the blood sample, he added