Islamabad: The massive UAE campaign to vaccinate three million children under the age of five against poliomyelitis (polio) in Pakistan was successful, the UAE Project to Assist Pakistan (UAE PAP) has announced.

The large-scale preventive health initiative, under the slogan Health for All - Better Future, is being carried out under the directives of President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and comes as part of the initiative of General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, to eradicate polio in the world.

The campaign is a humanitarian initiative aimed at vaccinating 3.64 million Pakistani children against polio over a period of three months — June, August and September — this year.

Shaikh Mohammad had previously donated Dh440 million as a contribution in support of the global effort to eradicate polio by 2018, with special focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan. This contribution is the second one to be provided by Shaikh Mohamed for delivering life-saving vaccines to children all over the world.

UAE PAP management said that June had seen the vaccination of 3.04 million children in 23 districts in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other tribal areas in Pakistan.

It said that the overwhelming success of the campaign to reach the three million mark in the first month of the three-month initiative proves the UAE’s effective efforts, under the leadership of Shaikh Khalifa, to deliver its noble, humanitarian goals and improve the health of people and prevent diseases and epidemics.

“Shaikh Mohammad’s initiative is important for Pakistan given the fact that the targeted regions are the world’s largest and deeply plagued by polio, but indicators of significant success have emerged from the first day of the campaign,’’ UAE PAP said in a statement.

Mobile units have overcome geographical challenges that prevented previous local and international campaigns from reaching these areas, which accounted for 95 per cent of Pakistan’s polio cases in the past six months, resulting in wider spread of the disease into other areas. Mobile medical teams have ventured into difficult remote mountainous regions to deliver vaccines.

However, the UAE efforts were fruitful thanks to the good planning, perfect field implementation, concerted coordination between the UAE PAP and other stakeholders, including the Pakistani army, local and federal Pakistani health authorities, and the World Health Organisation.

Pakistan is one of three countries where polio is still categorised as an endemic viral infection. WHO warned of the polio situation in Pakistan which reported 198 cases in 2011, the highest in ten years, compared with 58 cases in 2012 and 93 in 2013. Ninety-nine cases were registered in the first seven months of the current year compared with 24 in the same period last year.