Sindh witnesses 27th polio case this year

KARACHI: One more polio case surfaced in Sindh on Monday, pushing this year’s tally to 27 in the province and to 247 across the country.

According to Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), 4-month old Sumaira, daughter of Qadir Bakhsh, a resident of Shikarpur was diagnosed with the polio virus.

Twenty-three out of 27 polio cases in Sindh were reported from the suburbs of Karachi city this year.

A total of 247 cases have been reported from the country so far this year. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) report said Pakistan was responsible for nearly 80 percent cases reported globally.

It is pertinent to note here that Polio and health teams are facing threats across the country and only today a polio worker suffered injuries as a result of an attack in the Shabqadar district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

A splinter group of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar had claimed credit for the attack and its spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan on Monday tweeted that his group would soon release policy statement on polio vaccine.

As many as 64 health workers have been killed in the country since December 2012 in the wake of the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden who had been reportedly traced through a polio campaign conducted with the assistance of a Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi.