KARACHI: More than 7.6 million children in Sindh will be targeted by over 21,000 polio vaccination teams across the province as part of a nationwide three-day immunisation campaign starting on Monday, officials said.

As many as 33.5 million children under the age of five years across the country will be immunised in the campaign.

Officials said all sorts of arrangements had been made to make the three-day anti-polio campaign a success.

“We have taken all arrangements to ensure that the anti-polio drive, which will continue till April 17, will remain peaceful,” Dr Mazhar Khamisani, director of the expanded programme on immunisation, Sindh, told Dawn on Sunday.

He said precautionary safety measures had been planned to peacefully complete the drive in some troubled localities of Karachi. Those localities included Baldia and Gadap.

A three-day campaign for Gadap was already conducted during April 11-13 for its 218,000 children, but teams will again go in these localities to ensure that no child was missed out.

The campaign, particularly in UC-4, had been abruptly ended twice after attacks on a WHO doctor and several polio vaccinators last year.

The latest attack was carried out on December 17 when a young volunteer associated with the anti-polio campaign was shot dead in Gadap Town in a third such attack in the area on polio workers last year, stopping the three-day anti-polio campaign in most volatile Union Council 4.

In July 2012, a local paramedic associated with the polio vaccination was shot dead and a World Health Organisation doctor, Fosten Dido, from Ghana and his driver were wounded in two separate attacks in the Sohrab Goth area.

According to the plan prepared by the organisers, some 2,254,952 children in Karachi will be administered polio drops during the coming three days. Some 6,948 teams have been formed to accomplish this task in congested neighbourhoods.