New Delhi, Feb 05: India would launch the biggest ever mass immunisation campaign on February 9 to combat the polio epidemic targetting 165 million children. Over 1.3 million vaccination teams of volunteers and health workers, equipped with nearly 200 million doses of vaccine, would go house-to-house and work at booths to reach every child under the age of five years, a Unicef release said today. In 2002, the target year to stop polio virus transmission globally, India and Nigeria were the only two countries to see a significant rise in new cases. Indian state of Uttar Pradesh alone accounted for 66 per cent of the cases in the world, it said.
The Centre, Uttar Pradesh Government, WHO, Rotary International, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Unicef would participate in the campaign under which over 33 million children in UP including 2.5 lakh new born would be vaccinated, the release said. Community leaders, film and cricket stars would also be roped in to galvanize the campaign, it added.
Bureau Report