to 59 months during the upcoming campaign, the WHO said."This decision will allow us to make a giant stride in the efforts to eradicate polio," said Herve Ludovic De Lys, Unicef Representative in Afghanistan."To eliminate polio completely, every child in every household across Afghanistan must be vaccinated, and with our partners, this is what we are setting out to do," he said.The safety and security of health workers remain a prime concern for the polio programme. The Taliban leadership has expressed their commitment for the inclusion of female frontline workers and for providing security and assuring the safety of all health workers across the country, which is an essential prerequisite for the implementation of polio vaccination campaigns, the Unicef statement said.Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two remaining polio endemic countries in the world.According to a Nature report, polio cases tripled in the country between 2018 and 2020. Approximately three million children, a third of those eligible, were thus left out of vaccination campaigns. Now with the complete takeover of Afghanistan in July by Taliban, and several international organisations pulling
out funds, there has been an increased risk of resurgence of polio, Covid-19 and other diseases there.The new polio programme is the result of ongoing high-level dialogue between the UN and the Taliban leadership to
swiftly and urgently meet the health needs of the people in Afghanistan.
--IANS ksk-rvt/
(Disclaimer: This post has been auto published from IANS news agency without any modification to the text and has not been reviewed by editor)
