About 15 lakh children between the ages of 0 to 5 years were covered under the Sub-National Intensified Pulse Polio Immunisation (IPPI) round in 13 districts of Haryana on Sunday, the first day of the three-day campaign.
The children who were administered the pulse polio drops on the first day constituted about 57 per cent of the targeted 26 lakh children to be covered during the three-day campaign.
A spokesperson of Haryana Health Department said that these 13 districts included Ambala, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Jhajjar, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Mewat, Palwal, Panchkula, Panipat, Rohtak, Sonipat and Yamunanagar.
He said that a total of 10,636 booths were setup at locations convenient to the community to administer polio drops to the children. These booths were manned by about 42,000 officials of Health Department, Anganwadi Workers, Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), volunteers and others. About 2,100 officials supervised the activity apart from Independent Monitors of NPSP-WHO.
He said that the left out children during the booth activity on the first day would be administered polio vaccine drops on November 17 and 18 through house-to-house teams. He said that during this round, special attention had 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.
About 1,000 mobile teams are also working during the activity to cover all children in under-served and poorly approachable areas, he added.