Two-year old Girl With Polio Detected in UP

One more polio case has surfaced in Uttar Pradesh with the World Health Organisation's (WHO) surveillance team detecting a two-year-old girl affected with polio virus in the district .

WHO's Survillence Medical Officer Salman Khan today said that a two-year-old girl from Shahpur Tahar Khera village of the district has been detected with polio.

"She has been detected with P-1 virus", he told PTI and added that the girl's parents claimed that the kid had been administered polio drops on several occasions.

Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Sudhakar Dwivedi attributed lack of sanitation as the main reason for the polio case in the concerned village.

Earlier this month, the Centre has expressed concern over the recent spurt in polio cases with as many as 34 cases reported mainly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar till May this year. It had said the two states should take the blame for "failure" to tackle the disease.

While UP accounted for 21 cases, 12 cases were reported from Bihar and a solitary case from Madhya Pradesh.

UP saw a spurt in polio cases in 2002 when 1,242 cases were reported. But in the following years, the state witnessed a decline with only 29 cases reported last year.

However, this year saw a sudden rise of 21 cases in the first five months which causes concern, the sources said.

Of the 22 cases reported from UP, Moradabad district alone accounted for 11 followed by three in Badaon, two each in Bareilly and Farukkabad and one each in Bulandsahar, Ferozabad, J P Nagar and Pilibhit.