QUETTA: Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan shot and killed a police officer guarding a polio immunization team on Tuesday morning, the latest attack on efforts to protect children from the crippling and sometimes deadly disease.

The assault took place in Kili Tarata in District Pishin in the impoverished Balochistan province. Yasir Bazai, the deputy commissioner of Pihsin, said the gunmen targeted the police constable, Muhammad Hashim, as women polio volunteers were entering a house to administer vaccine drops.

“The constable was killed on the spot and shifted to the District Headquarter Hospital but the polio team remained unhurt in the attack,” Bazai told Arab News. “The district administration along with law enforcement agencies are investigating the attack and the hunt for the killers is underway.”

The attack comes a day after the provincial government in Balochistan launched a five-day anti-polio drive in 19 districts of the province on Monday, October 24, commemorated around the world as World Polio Day.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only remaining countries in the world where polio is still endemic despite immunization drives that have been ongoing for decades. Twenty new cases of the disease have been reported in Pakistan this year.

Polio workers have come under attack in some parts of the word, including Pakistan where hardline clerics and militants say the polio vaccine is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslims and campaign workers are Western spies.

Suspicion of immunization drives also threatens to undermine the government campaign. In 2019, a dozen people were arrested in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, accused of organizing a campaign against polio vaccination and setting fire to public health facilities in the provincial capital Peshawar.

The coordinator for the polio Emergency Operation Center (EOC) Balochistan, Syed Zahid Shah said security arrangements for polio teams had been beefed-up in all districts of the province after Tuesday's attack.

“Despite the attack on the polio team in district Pishin, the anti-polio drive is continuing in all 19 districts and will continue for the next three days because these cowardly attacks can’t stop us from performing our duties for the nobel cause,” Shah told Arab News.

Last week, global leaders committed $2.6 billion in funding at the World Health Summit, the World Health Organization said, to support global efforts to overcome the final hurdles to polio eradication, vaccinate 370 million children annually over the next five years and continue disease surveillance across 50 countries.