A Statewide pulse polio vaccination drive will be taken up for children below the age of five in a single round on Sunday.
Announcing this at a press conference in Bengaluru on Friday, Health and Family Welfare Minister B. Sriramulu said the drive would target 64,65,561 children in the State. It will be taken up from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The Health Department has set up 33,021 booths to administer polio drops. In addition to this, as many as 1,09,554 workers, 7,105 supervisors, and 977 mobile teams are geared up to take up the drive, the Minister said.
Appealing to parents to make use of the opportunity, he said volunteers and Health Department staff would also take up door-to-door visits for three days after the completion of the vaccination drive to identify children who missed out and administer polio drops to them.
The drive will focus on districts such as Bidar, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Yadgir, Koppal, Chitradurga, Ballari, Davangere, Haveri, Gadag, and Vijayapura, particularly the slums, hilly areas, construction hubs, brick kilns and tribal areas there, he said. There will be drives at railway and metro stations and at bus stands and airports.
People can identify the nearest vaccination centre using the Android app ‘Nearby Vaccination Centre, Karnataka’, Mr. Sriramulu said.
Saying that several schemes would be announced in the State Budget to improve health services, the Minister said there was a proposal to introduce a “pink bus” scheme on the lines of the 108 ambulance scheme.
‘State considering bringing back Yeshaswini’
Mr. Sriramulu on Friday said the State government was considering reintroducing the Yeshaswini health scheme.
He said discussions were on about the possibility of reintroducing the scheme, which was popular with farmers in particular. Yeshaswini is now merged with the Ayushman Bharat scheme. Admitting that people were facing inconveniences because of glitches in the Ayushman Bharat scheme of the Centre, Mr. Sriramulu said the anomaly would be rectified in 15 to 20 days when a new software is put to use.
