PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s polio eradication program said on Wednesday a new case of the virus had been confirmed in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bringing the total count for 2025 to seven, as a nationwide campaign to inoculate millions of children continued.

Pakistan on Monday began a week-long drive aimed at vaccinating over 45 million children against polio. The country, which reported 74 polio cases in 2024, has planned three major vaccination campaigns in the first half of the year. This week’s drive is the second one for 2025 while a third will begin May 26.

“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health Islamabad has confirmed a polio case from District Torghar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” the lab said in a statement, saying this was the second case from KP this year and the seventh from across Pakistan. 

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the last polio-endemic countries in the world. In the early 1990s, Pakistan 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.

But Pakistan’s polio program, launched in 1994, has faced persistent challenges including vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners who claim immunization is a foreign conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children or a guise for Western espionage. 

Militant groups have also repeatedly targeted and killed polio vaccination workers, including last week when gunmen attacked a vehicle and abducted two polio workers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. On Monday, one militant was killed when gunmen opened fire on a police party escorting a polio team on the outskirts of Wana, the main town in KP’s South Waziristan district. 

On Wednesday, two security officials deployed to protect a polio vaccine team were killed in a gun attack in the Teri area of Mastung in the southwestern Balochistan province. 

“Such incidents cannot diminish the resolve of the government of Pakistan to completely eradicate polio from the country,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement. 

“The people should not be disappointed but should protect their future by administering polio drops to their children. The anti-polio campaign will continue with full vigor under any circumstances.”