QUETTA: Pakistani health authorities on Monday concluded a week-long polio campaign in its southwestern Balochistan province, hit hardest by the disease, amid looming security threats to vaccinators and security forces guarding them.
Pakistan kickstarted the polio drive on Dec. 30 to vaccinate 2.6 million children against the disease in Balochistan. Pakistan reported 68 polio cases last year out of which 27 were from Balochistan. The northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Sindh provinces each recorded 19 cases while the eastern Punjab province and Islamabad each reported one case.
Pakistan, along with neighboring Afghanistan, remains the last polio-endemic country in the world.
“We have achieved our set target in the last province-wide anti-polio campaign,” Dr. Aftab Kakar, the provincial team lead at the National Stop Transmission of Polio (NSTOP) program told Arab News.
“We had set a target to vaccinate more than 2.6 million children but are gathering entry data from all districts but due to the suspension of mobile service in Quetta, some entries are pending.”
Polio is a paralyzing disease with no cure. To provide high immunity against the virus, multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five are essential.
“We are planning our next anti-polio drive in the first week of February 2025 with further training to the polio staff across Balochistan to make next drives more effective,” Kakar said. “We are very much optimistic that polio cases will decline this year because we have noticed a major decline since September and October 2024.”
Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994 but efforts to eradicate the virus have since been undermined by vaccine misinformation and opposition from some religious hard-liners, who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western spies. Militant groups also frequently attack and kill members of polio vaccine teams.
On Dec. 18, provincial health authorities postponed the nationwide anti-polio drive twice due to security reasons and a boycott by health staffers. The virus killed three children, including a minor girl, in Balochistan’s Quetta, Zhob and Killa Abdullah districts last year.
In the early 1990s, the country reported around 20,000 cases annually, but in 2018, the number dropped to eight cases. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.
