PESHAWAR: The authorities in Federally Administered Tribal Areas are able to detect suspected polio cases owing to improvement in law and order situation, according to of ficials.

`Health professionals associated with campaign against poliomyelitis are reporting more acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) cases owing to better surveillance after betterment in security situation, they said.

Officials said that they needed to find suspected cases of polio with AFP forsending their stool samples for analysis to National Institute of Health Islamabad.

Prior to 2013, the detection rate was low because in most of the health facilities, doctors were unable to perform their duty and report children with AFP to the WHO and Unicef for onward analysis owing to which missing of polio cases was feared.

However, now there is strong reporting system owing to which doctors are examining more children and report the suspected ones to be tested for poliomyelitis.

Ofhcials said that they had recorded 2,014 AFP cases in 2011, 149 in 2012, 313 in 2013, 474 in 2014, 267 in 2015, 482 in 2016 and 244 in the current year so far.

`Reporting more suspected cases leaves no room for missing of polio-affected children. We need to test every suspected child with a view to exclude poliomyelitis as cause of AFP,` they added.

Besides, improved law and order situation, officials also attribute the detectionof more AFP cases to the involvement of communities in the immunisation campaign. `Our workers in collaboration with the local people detect children for diagnosis at the NIH. The children, who are tested negative, are being treated by relevant doctors for other diseases,` they said.

Officials said that sending each and every suspected case of paralysis led to detection of virus while there were chances of missed polio cases in a week surveillance system.

A few months ago, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government made the AFP cases notifiable and directed all the hospitals to report such cases to the health department for testing and excluding poliomyelitis as a cause of paralysis.

The step was taken following complaints that all the doctors did not record such cases owing to which it was impossible to eliminate the virus.

`At a time, when both KP and Fata arenearing eradication of poliovirus after 20 years of immunisation, we cannot afford to miss polio-affected children,` said officials.

They added that as far as a single virus existed in any part of the world, poliomyelitis could not be eliminated.

Of ficials said that Fata, which recorded 59 polio cases in 2011, 20 in 2012, 65 in 2013, 179 in 2014, 16 in 2015 and two in 2016, was without a case in 2017 so f ar.

`We are vaccinating over one million children below five years in every campaign to be able to scale up their immunities against poliovirus,` they said.

Of ficials said that identification of AFP cases shot up af ter improvement in accessibility and communication and surveillance.

`An enhanced awareness campaign about the significance of the polio vaccination is also part of the strategy to sustain the gains regarding polio eradication in the past two years,` they added.