ISLAMABAD: In a phone call with Bill Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Pakistan had reported only one case of the wild poliovirus (WPV) this year, the PM Office said on Wednesday.

More than 40 million children were vaccinated in a nationwide campaign that ended last week. At the end of September 2021, the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme reported one case of polio compared to 78 cases at the same time last year.

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only countries in the world where polio is still an endemic disease. Vaccine hesitancy is high in Pakistan due to misinformation and militants often target polio teams and police assigned to protect them claiming the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Khan’s office said the PM spoke by telephone to Gates and told him Pakistan had “reported only one case of wild poliovirus (WPV) this year and positive WPV environmental samples have decreased substantially.”
 
“The Prime Minister emphasized that while the progress was positive, the work is still ongoing,” the statement said. “He stressed that his government remains committed to ending all forms of polio in the country.”

Gates and Khan also expressed concern regarding the health system in Afghanistan, and discussed the importance of polio campaigns resuming there to stem the disease and protect Pakistan’s recent gains in ending polio.

Pakistan, a country of over 220 million people, resumed its anti-polio campaigns in June, months after halting it due to the COVID-19 outbreak, which had overwhelmed the country’s health system, and amid threats to the campaign by militants. The third campaign ended in September.

In the latest drive, a total of 335,387 frontline polio workers in collaboration with other teams vaccinated children, including those living in difficult-to-reach areas across Pakistan, according to the National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) of the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme.

“The program has made significant gains with not a single case being reported for eight months, giving us a unique opportunity to achieve polio eradication,” NEOC coordinator Dr. Shahzad Baig said last week. “However, we need to re-double our efforts to ensure that every child is safe from this vaccine-preventable disease.”