Negotiating unmotorable roads and a rugged terrain, officials and volunteers reached 32 hamlets of Bangarupalem mandal in the district to conducted a pulse polio immunisation (PPI) drive.
Volunteers of the Rural Organization for Poverty Eradication Services (ROPES) along with officials negotiated a path through a forest for half an hour to take with them eight children to a vaccination camp from the Samasenumitta hamlet, close to the Tamil Nadu border. The remoteness of the hamlet is such that families did not know of the drive.
Volunteers visited mango plantations and fields abutting forests asking mothers to visit with their children mobile pulse polio camps. About 200 children from temporary habitations on the slopes of hillocks near Srinivasapuram, Pulimadugu and Paleru Bandapalle villages were brought to the camps on motorcycles.
Enduring fear
Paramedical staff, and local asha workers and anganwadi teachers helped in reaching out to parents to send their children to the camps.
ROPES Director P. Sree Latha said despite awareness programmes, some families didn’t take the drive seriously. “Some mothers continue to fear that taking polio drops would make a child suffer from high fever. Fortunately, more mothers are becoming aware every day,” she said.
Ms. Latha said that in coordination with village development committees, child-friendly accountability clubs and creative learning centres, officials covered 2,500 children in the hamlets.
“Our volunteers know locations of families with children below five years of years and could target them. Therefore the drive could be conducted successfully. They will continue to visit vulnerable villages for two days so that not even a single child is missed,” she said.