Uttar Pradesh Family Welfare Minister Ahmad Hasan Friday said polio vaccines have proved ineffective in the state in tackling the disease among children.
"We have grave suspicion about the quality of the vaccine, otherwise there is no reason why it should prove ineffective in so many cases. "Hasan told reporters here."After all, most of the detected cases are among children who had received at least one dose of the vaccine," he said.
Expressing its doubts about the quality and genuineness of the vaccine, the state government has even gone to the extent of shooting off a letter to the union health ministry.
"We have urged the centre to henceforth only send imported vaccines to our state and not the ones that are manufactured in a factory in New Delhi and in Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh itself," Hasan said.
Over a span of one year, the number of identified cases in Uttar Pradesh has shot up from 29 to 254.
According to a report, there were about 40 million children in the state under the age of five who needed to be vaccinated in each round of the programme, and 500,000 more were born every month.
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The worst affected district was Moradabad from where 56 cases were reported, followed by 21 each in Budaun and Muzaffarnagar, 20 in Meerut, 19 in Jai Prakash Nagar, 17 each in Rampur and Bijnore and 12 in Barielly and nine in Ghaziabad.
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