Fresh polio case reported in Sindh, takes countrywide tally to 27

• Fresh case involved an eight-month-old girl from Hyderabad.

• Nationwide polio vaccination campaign set to begin on October 13.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa tops the list for most cases with 18 detections.

KARACHI: A new polio case has been detected in Sindh’s Hyderabad district, raising the total number of reported cases to 27 this year, authorities confirmed on Monday.

The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at Islamabad’s National Institute of Health (NIH) said that the fresh case involved an eight-month-old girl from the province.

The latest detection takes the total tally of cases in Sindh to seven this year.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) tops the list with 18 polio cases, followed by Sindh’s seven cases. Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan have reported one case each this year so far.

The detection of the case comes just weeks before a nationwide polio vaccination campaign, set to begin on October 13 and run through October 19.

The drive — with participation from over 400,000 workers — is aimed at vaccinating around 45.4 million children across the country for protection against polio.

The upcoming vaccination campaign will follow the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) for Polio Eradication’s Sub-National Polio Vaccination Campaign, which took place earlier this month.

The vaccination drive was conducted across 88 districts of the country, including Hyderabad, reaching approximately 21 million children under the age of five.

Polio is a highly infectious and incurable disease that can cause lifelong paralysis.

The only effective protection is through repeated doses of the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) for every child under the age of five during each campaign, along with the timely completion of all routine immunisations.