15 lakh children administerd polio drops in 13

by Haryananewswire

CHANDIGARH, NOV 4

About 15.10 lakh  children below five years of age have been administered polio drops in 13 districts of Haryana   as the 3-day Sub-National Immunization round of Pulse Polio 2012-13 began today. About 26 lakh children are to be covered during this campaign in the state.

While stating this here today, a spokesman of Haryana Health Department said  these 13 districts included Ambala, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Jhajjar, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Mewat, Palwal, Panchkula, Panipat, Rohtak, Sonipat and Yamuna Nagar. In these districts the polio drops were administered at  booths to wipe out polio from the State.

This campaign will continue for another two days by way of house-to-house activity to trace and administer polio drops to the left out children on first day of the round. In order to smoothly carry out this campaign, a total of 10573 booths were setup in the state and these were manned by approximately 42,000 health officials, volunteers, Anganwari Workers and Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs). About 2100 officers, officials supervised the activity apart from Independent Monitors of PGIMS, Rohtak and National Polio Surveillance Project(NPSP)-WHO. This activity was preceded by undertaking an awareness campaign.

The left out children during the booth activity on first day will be administered polio vaccine drops on November 5 and 6 through house-to-house teams. During this round, special attention has been paid to high risk areas like slums, isolated hutments, brick kilns, floating or migrating population and construction sites so that no child is left uncovered in these areas. About 1000 mobile teams are also working to cover all children in underserved and poorly approachable areas. Wherever  pockets of children remain un-immunized, the Poliovirus sustains survival and circulation. With every successive round of Pulse Polio Immunization, the areas of Poliovirus circulation gets reduced. He, therefore, urged the people to cooperate with the health authorities for the success of the campaign.