KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah has ordered establishment of a 700-strong police force, headed by a senior superintendent of police, with the mandate to provide security to polio teams and asked the police chief to arrange 50 per cent personnel with weapons and vehicles dedicated to the mission of polio eradication.

Presiding over a meeting held at CM House on Saturday, Mr Shah also directed the health secretary and the Karachi commissioner to launch a crash programme for an anti-polio campaign in the 11 most-affected union councils of Karachi after Ashura and include Pakhtun female workers in polio teams to make it successful.

Besides the measures, the Sindh government believes the meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad next week would be a game-changer as it would decide about involving the army in future vaccination drives to bolster the security apparatus, ensuring that not a single house was missed.

Calling the situation in Sindh — its capital Karachi in particular — serious, the chief minister said that of the 23 polio cases in Sindh, 21 cases belonged to Pakhtun families many of whom had shifted to Karachi from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

He asked the authorities to identify all vulnerable neighbourhoods, cordon them with security and launch an aggressive vaccination programme for more than 107,000 children.

Officials said security was the key problem faced by polio teams in their endeavour to root out the crippling virus from the city. They said fewer than 2,000 police constables would be available during a polio campaign for more than 6,000 teams working across the city.

Even that security, said an official in the health department, did not reach in time and in most cases they were available for less than six hours in a day — the minimum requirement for a polio team to work in the field fixed by the health authorities.

A recent report prepared by the World Health Organisation shows that just five out of 18 towns did complete or nearly achieved the target of six hours in the field during campaigns this year. The towns were Keamari, Gulshan, Saddar, North Nazimabad and Shah Faisal.

The volatile UC-4 of Gadap received just two-and-a-half-hours, Korangi Town with 2:45 hours and Landhi 3:45 hours were the worst. Gadap’s UCs 5 and 8 got security for 4:30 hours, it noted.

Officials said they had requested for the involvement of paramilitary Rangers for the polio campaigns time and again previously but their pleas went unheard.

However, the huge cases of young children getting lifelong crippling disease forced the federal government to take certain strong measures, which included the government’s nod to the provinces to ask for the army’s involvement for security purposes in the ‘difficult areas’ whenever they required.

The government has to prove its commitment to counter the WHO observation according to which Pakistan “remains the greatest single risk to the achievement of global polio eradication”.

Already suffering from travel restrictions imposed by the WHO, the country has recently been blamed by the international health care regulator that it was responsible for 80 per cent of polio cases reported globally. With four new cases reported from Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) the country’s polio burden has increased to 235 thus far this year.

Some 151 out of 235 cases have been reported from Fata, 48 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 23 from Sindh, 10 from Balochistan and three from Punjab.

Officials in Islamabad and the Sindh government said Prime Minister Sharif invited the chief ministers of all the four provinces and would take the interior minister and senior military officials on board to make some crucial decisions to stem the increasing number of polio cases.

The officials said the Sindh chief minister and the chief secretary in the province would attend the meeting scheduled for Wednesday. A preparatory meeting was already held in the chief secretary’s office to do the homework required while presenting the situation in Sindh, they added.

“Our officials are busy in getting the micro plans and other documents in order. The provincial oversight committee headed by MNA Azra Fazal Pechuho is preparing Sindh’s case to be put before the senior authorities during the next week’s meeting,” said a senior official in the provincial government requesting anonymity.

The Islamabad meeting “is going to be a historic one. It has to be a game-changer as the government does not want to see any children missed vaccination any longer. The meeting is expected to decide to get the army for widespread campaigns,” said an official based in Islamabad.

An official in Karachi said it required just three effective campaigns to eradicate polio from the megacity. According to experts, the poliovirus transmission remains low during the winter months.

Published in Dawn, November 2nd , 2014