Hundreds of thousands of volunteers and health workers fanned out across Bangladesh Saturday to vaccinate some 24 million children under the age of 5 against polio, following an outbreak of new cases earlier this year, an official statement said. Parents with their children queued in about 120,000 immunization centers, many at bus and railway stations, airports, slums, schools, community centers and in remote villages, to eradicate the deadly disease that resurfaced after an absence of about five years, the Health and Family Planning Ministry said. The ministry adviser, Sufia Rahman, inaugurated the new round of inoculations, while another was scheduled to begin on Dec. 23, the Associated Press reported. In April, the government started the campaign with the help of the Global Polio Eradication Campaign _ a partnership among UNICEF, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Associated Press quoted the ministry as saying.
