Kabul, December 13, 2013 : .The Taliban-led Afghan government’s Public Health Ministry announced Monday that they have launched a campaign for polio vaccine doses to be administered to over 9.9 million children below the age of 5.
The campaign will be the final polio vaccine drive for 2021.The campaign will be continued in the next two weeks.It will now cover 21 out of the 34 Afghan provinces.
The Ministry stated in a statement that the next drive would cover the 13 provinces Kandahar and Helmand as well as Uruzgan, Nangarhar.
The campaign is technical and financial supported by Unicef (WHO) and World Health Organization (WHO), according to the statement.
The Unicef launched on November 8 a national polio vaccination campaign targeting 3.3 Million children for the first time ever since August’s Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
In the years after the Taliban was overthrown in 2001 by a US-led coalition, vaccination campaigns had made much progress in the country.
However, as the Taliban made inroads again, door-to-door visits by polio workers had been banned in Afghanistan, for three years now.
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.
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