LAHORE   -   The Emergency Operations Centre Coordinator and head of the polio programme in Punjab Mr Khizer Afzaal has instructed District Health Authorities to go an extra mile to prevent polio virus circulation in their respective districts, amid widespread detection of virus in environmental samples all over the country.

He was chairing a meeting on Friday to review readiness of districts regarding the polio eradication campaign starting from June 3 (Monday). Chief Executive Officers as well as other senior officials representing tehsils in six districts, where the polio eradication special campaign is being held, attended the meeting via a video link.  The EOC coordinator raised questions about lack of intent shown by the district health authorities during polio campaign, calling upon officials to improve their performance so that polio virus finds no refuge in target populations.

“The positive environmental samples indicate that there are pockets of unimmunized children who are vulnerable to polio virus. DDHOs will be held responsible if environmental samples are positive. DDHOs are field officers who need to go house-to-house to sensitize communities in their respective areas about campaign”, he said.  

The EOC coordinator was given briefing on the status of trainings, microplans and other pre-campaign indicators. He repeated his concern on low percentage of government accountable polio teams in Multan. The EOC head warned officials to not ignore polio campaigns at any cost.  Mr Afzaal showed dissatisfaction over sub-optimal polio team trainings and issued instructions to redo trainings in some of the priority union councils. He emphasized on developing a scoring sheet to reevaluate quality of trainings.  The EOC coordinator instructed the provincial EOC team to develop a proforma to monitor performance of district officials on weekly basis based on key priority indicators including field meetings and priority community interventions. He instructed the CEOs to strictly monitor performance of all officials under their watch.

Mr Afzaal stressed on the district officials to multi-task which was need of the hour considering intense polio virus transmission and other health priorities.

The EOC coordinator directed district authorities to take into consideration ongoing severe heatwave and meet every need of the frontline workers to ensure that heatwave challenge is tackled and at the same polio vaccine is delivered to every child. He announced that polio campaign will start from Monday June 3 which will continue for 7 days in mega districts including Lahore, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi. While in rest of the districts, the campaign will last 5 days, he said.