LONDON: Pakistan launched a drive to vaccinate 5.5 million children against pneumococcal disease to fight pneumonia, which kills tens of thousands of youngsters in the country every year.

Pakistan is the first country in South Asia to launch a campaign against the disease, according to UN children’s agency UNICEF, which is working with the government on the project.

Worldwide more than 1.3 million children under the age of five are killed each year by pneumonia and in Pakistan it accounts for almost 20 percent of child deaths, according to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). The move comes at a time when healthcare experts are still struggling to get polio vaccination accepted in parts of Pakistan, one of the few countries where it is still endemic.

Meanwhile, authorities in Pakistan’s largest city have launched an urgent investigation after a rare water-borne "brain-eating" amoeba killed 10 people in four months, officials said yesterday. The water company and health officials monitoring water in Karachi, home to 18 million people, have been ordered to trace the source of the Naegleria fowleri outbreak. Saghir Ahmed, health minister of southern Sindh province of which Karachi is capital, said the drinking supply, swimming places and facilities used for the ritual ablutions Muslims must perform before prayers were all under investigation.