“Elimination of polio from the district is the only way to secure our children’s future,” District Police Officer Sohail Zafar Chatta said on Monday. He was addressing the inauguration of the three-day anti polio campaign.
The DPO asked parents to cooperate with the health workers and ensure that their children were give vaccine. He also asked them not to fall victims to any false propagandas against polio vaccine.
The DPO gave vaccine to several children at his office on Monday. He said it was his responsibility to assure that the campaign was complete without any hurdle and that not a single child in the district was left deprived of the polio vaccine.
As many as 545,198 children under five years of age are to be administered polio vaccine in the district and 1,284 teams would take part in the campaign.
As many as 1,019 teams would go house-to-house, while 145 teams would vaccinate children in hospitals, rural health centres, basic health units and tehsil and district headquarters hospitals.
Earlier, Rahim Yar Khan DPO Sohail Habib Tajik had said that polio teams would vaccinate more than 700,000 children in the Rahim Yar Khan district.
The teams in both the districts are being provided police security.
The Health Department would also observe a mother and child week from April 24 to 30 during which pregnant women and children would be vaccinated.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 16th, 2013.