KARACHI: The turn of the new calendar year did not end the miseries of the city’s children who continue to be at the risk of the crippling polio disease with the eighth case of 2013 in Sindh only to be confirmed by the authorities in 2014.

The 13-month-old girl was the sixth child from Karachi and fourth from its least covered Gadap neighbourhood, which has been offering greater resistance to polio teams, particularly during the past two years.

Officials in the expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) of Sindh said they had received the reports of the stool samples of Fatima, daughter of Mehmood Gul, a Pakhtun labourer and resident of Medina Colony near Power House, New Sabzi Mandi of UC-5 of Gadap town, from the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad confirming detection of the virus in the victim.

“We had sent her stool samples to the NIH on Dec 13 when she had been admitted to the Civil Hospital Karachi and on Wednesday the virus has been confirmed in the child,” said Dr Durre Naz Jamal, deputy chief of the EPI, Sindh.

Officials in the health department admitted that frequent polio cases in the province had shocked them.

“We had four cases till the mid of November, but in the space of less than two months four more cases — three in Karachi and another in Kashmore — have been detected, which should be taken as highly alarming,” an official told Dawn.

The officials said MNA Azra Fazal Pechuho, a sister of former president Asif Ali Zardari who chairs a supervisory committee on polio in Sindh, had already taken ‘serious notice’ of the spreading of the disease and called for effective measures to keep children safe in 2014.

“Despite all such attention and continued immunisation campaigns, the situation is not satisfactory in Sindh at all. In fact, it is getting worse now and all our efforts so far proved to be chasing shadows,” another official said.

There have been increasing refusals witnessed in Sindh particularly during the last year. Most of them came either from Pakhtun families and a few districts, which have witnessed some militant attacks in the recent past.

The last national immunisation drive was in November, in which there were 30,231 refusals at the outset, out of which the teams managed to convert 14,589.

“The remainder of refusals is 15,642 in Sindh, which is good performance,” said a recent UNICEF report.

Last year, total number of polio cases in Pakistan rose to 84 as compared to 58 in 2012; the number of infected districts/towns/tribal agencies/ areas in the country was 20 as compared to 28 the preceding year.

“It is important to mention that 83 per cent of the total polio cases are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (10 cases) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (60),” said the UNICEF report

In Sindh, Karachi is the place with greater concern for the authorities, where too Gadap and Baldia towns are the areas where positive samples were still surfacing.

Another official said the deteriorating law and order situation and persistent strikes and violent protests had made it hugely difficult for the authorities to accomplish the immunisation campaigns on schedule in Karachi.

He feared more children, who missed out because of such reasons in the campaigns, were at huge risk.

He said the nationwide campaign to inoculate 33 million children in the country, including 2.2m of Karachi, had been successfully completed elsewhere but Karachi where still many sensitive areas had not been covered.

He said the Karachi police prioritised general security over polio campaigns and frequently denied security to polio teams for other preoccupations.

The polio campaigns had been abruptly ended in Karachi more than once after attacks on a WHO doctor and several polio vaccinators last year.

In a botched attack over the police guarding polio teams in Gadap on Dec 17, an attacker was killed and another was arrested.

A year before the same day, a young volunteer associated with the anti-polio campaign was shot dead in the same area in a third such attack in the neighbourhood on polio workers in 2012, stopping the three-day anti-polio campaign in the most volatile Union Council No 4.

According to official figures, as many as 744 polio cases have been detected during the last 17 years in Sindh. Last year showed the best result for the provincial anti-polio campaigners yet it crippled four children.