Students fall ill after being administered polio drops in Pak, parents ransack health centre

Several school students in Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province reportedly fell ill and were taken to hospital after being administered anti-polio drops during a nation-wide campaign on Monday, sparking violent protests by the parents and relatives who ransacked a local health facility, according to a media report.

Pakistan is one of the three countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where polio is still endemic. It launched a country-wide campaign on Monday to administer anti-polio drops 39 million children under five years of age.

More than 260,000 polio workers have been deployed to administer anti-polio vaccines to children in all four provinces as well as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

Dozens of students of schools in Mashokhel in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa were rushed for medical attention because they felt unwell after being administered the polio vaccine, the Express Tribune reported.

While the schools administration and the parents accused the polio vaccine for the students' ill-health, officials associated with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and other health departments rejected it, saying it is the safest vaccine.

"The anti-polio vaccine is the safest vaccine that has protected millions of children from disabilities. The polio vaccine is administered to millions of children in every polio campaign in the country without any adverse effects," EOC Coordinator Capt (retd) Kamran Afridi was quoted as saying.

Rejecting the reports on various media outlets linking the children's condition with the vaccine, he said, "It was reported that children from two private schools in Peshawar fell sick due to the polio vaccine but that is not true. The children are in stable condition."