LAHORE, June 20: The Punjab government on Thursday asked the Unicef for airlifting additional 12.5 million doses of vaccine on emergency basis to extend the anti-measles campaign to rest of the districts other than those 18 underlined for the drive starting from June 24.
Health Director General (DG) Dr Tanvir Ahmad wrote to the Unicef that 11.2 million more children in 17 districts of Punjab were on the high risk of contracting measles, a senior official told this reporter.
He said the health DG intimated to the global health body that the Punjab government needed 12.5 million doses of the vaccine.
“We are going to procure more vaccine from the Unicef to immunise all 27.4 million children aged between six months and 10 years against measles,” Tanvir Ahmad told Dawn.
He, however, was unaware of the cost required for the procurement of the new batch of the vaccine saying that it “depends upon the cost statement the Unicef will provide.”
On the other hand, over 16.2 million children in 18 districts of Punjab would get anti-measles vaccine during the June 24 drive scheduled for the first time since the last mass campaign launched in 2008, an official privy to the information told this reporter.
According to the plan, he said, the campaign would be launched first on June 24 in 12 districts and then on June 28 in the rest of the six districts.
The paediatric and public health experts believed that 16.2 million children had been exposed to the ‘killer infectious disease’ as the Punjab administration missed them in the second mass drive in 2011 and in later routine coverage too.
They said the five-year gap in administering vaccine caused outbreak of measles in 2013.
A senior paediatrician who is familiar to issues relating to the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) said a delegation of the WHO and the Unicef visited Islamabad in February 2013 and strongly recommended countrywide measles campaign without any delay. He said the recommendations were made on the basis of the reports of measles epidemic particularly in Punjab that started in November 2012.
However, the federal as well as the Punjab governments ignored these critical instructions.
