39 million children to be vaccinated during ongoing anti-polio drive

LAHORE: A country-wide campaign to administer anti-polio vaccine to children under five years of age is successfully going on in the country and over 39 million children will be given anti-polio drops in five days.

According to the Punjab Health Department sources on Tuesday, children in all four provinces as well as Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan will be administered vaccine.

More than 260,000 health workers are going door-to-door to administer polio drops to children and the campaign will continue till April 26.

Sources said that a total of 20 million children will be administrated polio vaccine in Punjab, nine million in Sindh, over 6.8 million children in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and 2.4 million in Balochistan during the campaign.

In Islamabad, 0.4 million children will be administered anti-polio drops while 0.7 million children will be vaccinated in Kashmir.

He said that in Peshawar over 1.6 million children under 10 years of age will be vaccinated as the KP provincial capital was the most affected area of the country.

Pakistan is one of the three countries where polio remains endemic, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria.