20000410

Polio eradication

campaign in NWFP

from tomorrow

ISLAMABAD: A three-day house-to-house polio eradication campaign will be launched in NWFP on Tuesday.

Health workers and volunteers will go house-to-house in Peshawar, Kohat and D.I. Khan districts to administer polio drops to children under five years of age.

Extended Programme of Immunisation (EPI), National Institute of Health and WHO will supervise the anti-polio campaign. "We are ensuring that no children should be left without polio drop," an official of WHO Jean Welsh said.

She said due to consistent and concrete efforts the polio cases considerably dropped, and the time was not far away when the polio would be fully eradicated from the country.

Jean Welsh said the cooperation of parents and social workers was imperative to achieve the desired results in eradicating the menace of polio.

The WHO has chalked out a detailed programme providing better support to the field staff for better results of routine immunisation.

Effective strategies need to be adopted for the immunisation programme Jean said, adding: "We have to educate our public in this respect through well-planned and finely executed Health Education Programmes, so that the people themselves take interest in the routine immunisation."

The first round of Polio Day was held in 1994. So far, many rounds of polio days have been held. The number of polio cases have been brought down from 1,873 in 1993 to 400 by December, 1999.

The disease which is an infectious, caused by a virus. It can strike at any age, but affects mainly children under three (over 50 percent of all cases).

The disease causes paralysis, which is almost always irreversible. In the most severe cases, polio paralysis can lead to death by asphyxiation. Polio follows infection with any one of three related enteroviruses: Polio virus types 1, 2, or 3.

The virus enters through the mouth and then multiplies inside the throat and intestines. The incubation period is 4-35 days and the initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, headaches, vomiting, constipation (or less commonly diarrhoea), stiffness in the neck, and pain in the limbs.

Although polio paralysis is the most visible sign of polio infection, fewer than one percent of polio infections ever result in paralysis.

Most cases (90 percent) produce very mild or no symptoms and usually go unrecognised. A further 5 percent to 10 percent of polio infections result in asepticmeningitis, a viral inflammation of the outer covering (meninges) of the brain.

The rest involve mild flu-like symptoms common to other viral infections mild fever, sore throat, abdominal pain, and vomiting.

No one knows why only a small percentage of infections lead to paralysis. Several key risk factors have been identified as increasing the likelihood of paralysis in a person infected with polio.ÑAPP