CHITRAL, Feb 25: Authorities here are in no mood of taking chances to prevent poliomyelitis despite the fact that the district has been free from the disease for the last 18 years.

“We are the first district in the country which had stayed free of polio since 1992 by the ministry of health and the World Health Organisation. The credit for this landmark achievement goes to the civil society which has been found extremely vigilant and cooperative,” said Dr Sher Qayum, executive district officer, health, here on Thursday.Still there was no laxity in our efforts and our vaccination coverage was almost 100 per cent, he said.

While talking to Dawn , he said that area-wise Chitral was the largest district of the province encompassing an area of 14,850 square kilometres with sparsely populated settlements but each and every child was approached by vaccination teams without failure.

Dr Qayum said that keeping in view the enormous size of the area, more than 210 regular mobile teams were dispatched to the sub-valleys during the campaign while 30 fixed centres and three transit points had been set up to ensure 100 per cent coverage.

The district health officer said that Aga Khan Health Service had been assigned the remote areas of the district for the administration of polio vaccine to the children.

He said that no refusal case had ever been reported from any part of the district. However, he recalled a single case in Drosh four years ago where the team administering polio drops were sent back by five families.

“When I rushed to the area to ascertain the reason, it was found that the refusing families were not local. They hailed from Baluchistan and were working here as labour in the Lowari tunnel project,” he said, adding that they were persuaded to the extent that during the next campaign, they themselves approached us to get their children vaccinated.

Dr Qayum said that the number of children below five years of age was more than 90,000 and his department had scientific record of immunisation of all children.

“We keep data of each and every target child to ensure that he or she is not missed in the immunisation campaigns. Our workers are also administering vaccines for other ailments,” he said.

The EDO said that after each campaign, independent surveyors are sent to different valleys to ascertain the number of left-over cases, if any.

He eulogised the role of religious leaders for educating the people to make the campaign against deadly disease a success.