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| India plans new polio immunisation drive after 136 cases reported | | | NEW DELHI : India launched an immunisation drive targeting 45 million children after recording
136 cases of polio since January, an official said.
"We have noticed 136 cases of polio in India so far," said Sobhan Sarkar, the national technical advisor
on polio to the health ministry.
"Of these 121 have been recorded from one state, (northern) Uttar Pradesh," Sarkar said. The other
cases were in the eastern state of Bihar, neighbouring Jharkhand and the central state of Madhya
Pradesh, he said on Sunday.
What was alarming was the reappearance of polio in Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, two states that
had previously eliminated the virus, Sarkar said.
"These seem to be cases of polio imported from the highly endemic states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,"
he said.
The vaccination drive starting Sunday is aimed at containing the virus to these four states, he said.
India accounted for 83 percent of the world's new polio cases in 2002 with 1,600 cases recorded that
year.
Polio, largely eliminated in most of the world, still exists in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and
Afghanistan among other countries with 1,900 cases reported worldwide last year, according to the
Global Polio Eradication Initiative spearheaded by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In India the number of cases was cut to 66 in 2005, according to WHO figures, thanks to television and
print campaigns featuring film stars.
But persistent recurrence of the disease in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar has resulted in India missing its
deadlines for eradicating the crippling disease. The latest deadline missed was January 2005.
A federal health ministry official said Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were not doing enough to eliminate polio.
"We are seeing the virus spread from the western districts of Uttar Pradesh eastwards to the central
districts and this is a major worry for us," said the senior official, who declined to be identified.
"The main reason for the transmission of the disease is that we missed a lot of children during
immunisation drives in these areas in the latter half of 2005," the official said.
The vaccination drive will cover the four affected states and target children missed previously |
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