LANDI KOTAL, June 6: Escorted by the security forces and officials of political administration, health teams administered anti-polio drops to children in Sipah area of Bara tehsil in Khyber Agency.

Local sources said that a Bara-based militant organisation had warned the residents of the area against vaccinating their children.

The political administration also deployed its officials on Tuesday and Wednesday to help the polio teams to reach those areas, which were inaccessible for them during the previous vaccination campaigns.

Agency Surgeon Dr Azam Wazir said that they were still faced with some resistance in few localities of Akkakhel like Fort Salop and Zaodin.

He said that local administration was making every effort to access maximum number of children in Bara under the age of five years.

However, some officials feared that despite all those efforts, about 30,000 children could not be vaccinated and they would be at risk of contracting polio virus.

They said that Bara tehsil of Khyber Agency was the only place in the entire country where they had found both Type-3 and Type-1 polio virus that had so far infected six children since start of the year 2012.

Meanwhile, the Walikhel tribesmen of Landi Kotal on Wednesday refused briefly to vaccinate their children as a protest against power outages in their area.

Officials said that a handful of residents of Qayum Kallay stopped health workers from carrying out door-to-door vaccination drive to register their protest against power suspension.

They said that the power suspension was caused owing to a fault in the supply line to most parts of Walikhel locality. However, the residents allowed the health teams to administer vaccine to their children after restoration of electricity.

Haji Saleem, an elder of the area, said they were not averse to vaccinating their children against polio but just wanted to apprise the officials of the prolonged loadshedding and acute shortage of water in their area.