No polio case emerges in Sindh during the last 30 months, says Murad Shah 

KARACHI: Pakistan has reported 20 cases of Polio since April 2022 and all belong to South Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while positive environmental samples have also been reported from all provinces, but it is a great achievement for Sindh that no Polio case has been reported over the last 30 months. 

This he said in a meeting with a delegation of the Polio Oversight Board (POB) led by its chairman Dr Christopher Elias. The CM inaugurated the Anti-Polio campaign starting presently in eight `Very High-Risk Districts’, including seven districts of Karachi and Hyderabad District by administering polio drops to children here at CM House on Monday.  

During a week-long campaign more than 2,771,089 children, under 5, would be vaccinated, the health minister Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho, briefing the meeting, said and more than 27,000 polio workers have been deployed for the campaign.  

According to the health minister, around 2,943 male and 113 female security personnel have been deployed.  An additional 26 senior field staff from other divisions of Sindh were deployed for monitoring and supportive supervision in very high-risk and poor-performing UCs. 

The CM said that Pakistan is one of the two polio-endemic countries in the world along with Afghanistan. He added that Pakistan has reported 20 cases of Polio since April 2022, and all the cases belonged to South KP while positive environmental samples have also been reported from all provinces.  

Mr Shah said that it was a great achievement for his government that no Polio case has been reported over the last 30 months. “The last Polio case was reported on 14th July from Jacobabad while in Karachi on 09th June 2020 from Landhi, District Malir, and has had continuous negative environment samples for the past one year except one in August 2022 from Landhi, district Malir. 

Murad Ali Shah said that after the first case reported (April 2022) from North Waziristan, the EOC Sindh increased vigilance over the entry and exit points at the provincial borders and vaccinated 128,0495 children out of 30,937 belonging to South KP District. 

Mr Shah said that efforts in the programme have resulted in more than a 60 percent reduction in refusals and missed children, but we must bring them down further, especially in Karachi.