Haryana to cover 26 lakh children under IPPI

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by Haryananewswire (Balbir)
Chandigarh, Dec 4
About 26 lakh children between the age of 0 to 5 years in 13 districts of Haryana will be covered under the Sub-National Intensified Pulse Polio Immunization (IPPI) round scheduled to be held from December 6 to 8, 2009.
While stating this today, Haryana Health Minister, Mrs Geeta Bhukkal said that these targeted districts included Ambala, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Jhajjar, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Mewat, Palwal,Panchkula, Panipat, Rohtak, Sonipat and Yamuna Nagar.
She said that this IPPI round has been necessitated in view of the recently detected Wild Polio Virus P3 in district Faridabad and Solan in Himachal Pradesh. Therefore, the Central Government has decided to conduct this round with mOPV3 vaccine in districts of Faridabad, Gurgaon, Mewat, Palwal and Panchkula and in rest of the districts mOPV1 vaccine would be used.
Sofar in the year 2009, as many as 650 cases of polio have been confirmed in the country out of which 634 cases are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and one P3 case has so far been confirmed at Faridabad in Haryana. As Haryana is the bordering state of Uttar Pradesh and gets a lot of migration from this neighbouring State, it is very important to implement high quality IPPI round with increased administrative
involvement and advocacy to maintain high level of immunity.
Mrs Geeta Bhukkal said that all arrangements for the successful implementation of the Sub-national IPPI round have been finalized in the State. A total of 10,112 booths would be setup at locations convenient to the people. These booths would be manned by more than 40,000 vaccinators drawn from Health, Integrated Child Development Services Scheme, Education Departments, NGOs, Indian Medical
Association, Self Help Groups and community volunteers. About 2500 supervisors would be pressed into service to oversee the functioning of the vaccination teams and to ensure that no child is left un-immunized. Nodal officers from State headquarters and independent monitors from Pt. B.D.S. Post-graduate Institute of Medical Sciences,
Rohtak would also monitor the activity to ensure complete coverage.
To prevent the occurrence of polio cases in the state, it is of paramount importance that during the December 2009 round and subsequent rounds, no child of 0-5 year age group remains without receiving Pulse Polio drops.For Polio eradication, Pulse Polio Immunization (PPI) is one of the important strategies besides the
routine immunization programme. Pulse polio immunization aims at eliminating the environmental wild virus the disease causing virus,through simultaneous administration of oral polio vaccine to the susceptible age group of 0-5 years. With every successive round of PPI, the areas of poliovirus circulation gets reduced in number and extent.
The focus during December 2009 round will be to ensure coverage of each 0-5 year child, especially those residing in slums, labour colonies inhabited by migratory population, brick-kilns, children of industrial labour, rice-shellers, stone crushers, construction sites, nomadic population and children in transit at bus-stands, railway stations, Hatt-Bazaars and market places.
Mrs Bhukkal urged the people to provide their whole hearted support for the success of this programme to stop polio virus transmission and occurrence of cases. She also urged the people to bring all target age children to their respective locality booths for Pulse Polio drops on December 6. She said that for subsequent two days, that is December 7 and 8, teams would go from house to house to administer pulse polio drops to those children who might have not come to the booth on the
first day of the campaign.