KARACHI: Pakistan will adopt new approaches in its fight against polio as the country confirmed its 19th virus case of the year, the country’s top polio official said on Friday, stressing the need for accountability and innovation ahead of the next nationwide vaccination drive next month.
Pakistan recorded its 19th polio case of the year this week after a five-month-old child tested positive in the northwestern Lakki Marwat district. Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries where polio is still endemic.
Islamabad made significant progress in curbing the virus, with annual cases falling from around 20,000 in the early 1990s to just eight in 2018. Pakistan reported six cases in 2023 and only one in 2021, but the virus resurged sharply in 2024 with 74 reported cases.
“We will work differently this year, moving beyond traditional approaches and exploring new solutions,” said Ayesha Raza Farooq, the Prime Minister’s Focal Person on Polio, after chairing a meeting of the National Polio Management Team in Islamabad.
The meeting brought together the National Emergency Operations Center, provincial polio coordinators and international eradication partners to review the situation across all four provinces.
“The spread of the poliovirus has increased, but work is continuing toward improvement,” Farooq added. “The period before a polio campaign is crucial for results.”
Health authorities will begin the next nationwide polio vaccination campaign on September 1, with a special focus on high-risk and priority areas including southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Farooq directed teams in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the worst hit province with 12 of the total 19 cases, to address security challenges in its southern districts and emphasized maintaining efforts in both high-risk hotspots and better-performing areas.
“Polio eradication requires real accountability at every level,” she said, adding that collaboration with routine immunization programs remained critical.
Pakistan’s efforts to eradicate the virus have been repeatedly undermined by vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners who claim that immunization is a foreign plot to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western espionage. Militant groups also frequently target polio vaccination teams, and the security personnel assigned to protect them, particularly in the KP and Balochistan provinces.
