Chandigarh, Feb 19- About 26.65 lakh children below five years of age have been administered polio drops in the first National Immunization round of Pulse Polio 2011- conducted in all districts of Haryana today. Polio drops were administered to children at booths on the first day of the campaign today to wipe out polio from the State.
Stating this today, a spokesman of Health Department said that while Health Minister Rao Narender Singh inaugurated the campaign in Narnaul, Mr Ram Kishan Fauji, Chief Parliamentary Secretary inaugurated the campaign in district Bhiwani and Mr Sampat Singh, MLA launched the campaign in district Hisar.
This campaign will continue for another two days by way of house-to-house activity to trace and administer polio drops to the left out children today . About 65 per cent of the targeted 41.0 lakh children were covered today during booth activity. In order to smoothly carry out this campaign, more than 16500 booths were setup in the state and these were manned by about 60,000 health officials ,volunteers,Anganwari Workers and ASHAs. About 3200 officers or officials supervised the activity apart from independent monitors from the PGIMS, Rohtak and National Polio Surveillance Project -WHO. This activity was preceded by undertaking awareness campaign. The left out children during the booth activity on first day will be administered polio vaccine drops on tomorrow and day after tomorrow through teams which go from house to house.
During this round, special attention has been paid to high risk areas like slums, isolated hutments, brick kilns, floating or migrating population and construction sites so that no child is left uncovered in these areas. Wherever, pockets of children remain un-immunized, the poliovirus sustains survival and circulation. With every successive round of Pulse Polio Immunization, the areas of Poliovirus circulation get reduced.
The spokesman urged the people to cooperate for the success of the campaign.