Sargodha family refuses polio drops and locks workers into a room | Health

SARGODHA: A polio team was attacked and locked in a room by a family who refused to give polio drops to their children in Sargodha on Thursday.

Police said a team of polio workers were administering polio drops in the Kot Raja area of ​​Sargodha when a man by the name of Shamsher refused the drops for his children.

Threatened with legal repercussions, the man and his family verbally abused the two health workers and locked them in a room.

The police registered a case against five suspects and opened an investigation. However, she still has not apprehended a suspect.

Poliomyelitis, or poliomyelitis, is a debilitating childhood disease caused by the polio virus and can be prevented by vaccination. Affecting mainly children under five years of age, polio – which does not cure and can not be prevented by administering multiple doses of vaccine to a child – can lead to irreversible paralysis.

Polio eradication across the country was launched in the country on January 21st. More than 39 million children under five will receive two drops of vaccine to protect them from poliovirus. At least 260,000 polio workers and more than 31,000 teams are participating in the campaign across the country.

The country has been fighting polio for several years and is on the verge of eradicating the disease altogether. The number of cases increased from 306 in 2014 to 54 in 2015, 20 in 2016 and eight in 2017. In 2018, 12 cases were reported.

A country should not have a case for three consecutive years to be considered as having eradicated poliomyelitis by the World Health Organization.