Over 23 lakh children below the age of five years in the State will be administered an additional dose of oral polio vaccine on March 3, Sunday, as part of the nationwide Pulse Polio immunisation drive.
The target population of children under five years of age in the State is 23,28,258. The Health department has arranged 23,471 booths, including mobile and transit booths, to administer the vaccine to the children. A total of 46,942 volunteers and 1,564 supervisors have been trained to conduct the drive in the State.
The booths will function from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. on March 3.
Booths have been set up in schools, anganwadis, reading rooms/libraries, health centres and in public places like railway and bus stations, airports, tourist centres and in the camps of migrant labourers.
The volunteers will visit houses on March 4 and 5 as part of mop-up rounds, to ensure that the oral polio vaccine is administered to children who may have missed receiving the vaccine on March 3.
Health Minister Veena George, in a statement here appealed to all parents to be a part of the Pulse Polio drive and to administer the vaccine to children under five years of age.
Polio eradication in India
The Pulse Polio Immunisation Programme was rolled out in India on 2 October 1994, when India accounted for around 60% of the global polio cases.
The last case of polio due to the wild polio virus was reported in Kerala from Malappuram in 2000. No cases due to the wild virus have been reported in India since 2011.
India received a ‘Polio-free certification’ from the World Health Organisation, along with the entire South-East Asia Region on the 27 March 2014.
According to the WHO, wild polio virus cases continue to be reported in neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan and as long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio. Failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in as many as 200 000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world, WHO says.
Hence, one national polio immunisation day and two sub-national immunisation days are held in the country every year to maintain population immunity against the wild virus and thus maintain India’s polio-free status. At the same time, injectable inactivated polio vaccine has been made part of the national immunisation schedule for providing routine immunisation cover to all children.
All local self government bodies, voluntary organisations and various departments are participating to conduct the Pulse Polio drive.
