KABUL (SW) – A four-day polio vaccination drive has begun, announced the Ministry of Public Health.
Sharaf Zaman, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Public Health, said that in this round, more than seven million children will receive anti-polio vaccine. “The anti-polio vaccination campaign has started in the southwestern, southeastern, and eastern provinces of Afghanistan and will continue until Thursday.”
Kamal Shah, the spokesperson of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Afghanistan, told Salam Watandar that the implementation of this campaign in the eastern region of the country is different from the Ministry of Public Health.
“In the eastern region of the country, in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan, it will start after a week because the anti-polio vaccine was implemented in these provinces a while ago”.
At the same time, a number of doctors consider the disease of children’s paralysis to be contagious, which is transmitted by eating food and drinking contaminated water and swimming in running water.
Mohammad Sadeq Naimi, one of the doctors, asks families to vaccinate their children against polio to prevent paralysis.
“Polio is an infectious and contagious disease that damages the child’s nervous system and causes paralysis. We ask families to vaccinate their children.”
Religious scholars also want the attention of families for the anti-polio vaccine and prevent children from this disease.
Abdullah Ehsani, a religious scholar, said: “We ask families to take health matters seriously and save their children from paralysis. Implementation of the anti-polio vaccine is important and vital and does not contradict Sharia law”.
It should be mentioned that Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries in the world where polio has not completely disappeared.
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