KARACHI: Pakistan will launch a new polio vaccination campaign from Sept. 1 to immunize 28 million children under five across 97 high-risk districts, officials said on Thursday, warning that widespread flooding has increased the risk of virus transmission.
The National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) said the week-long drive, led by the government’s Polio Eradication Programme, will be carried out by more than 240,000 frontline health workers going door-to-door across Balochistan, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Jammu & Kashmir, and Islamabad.
Three major rivers burst their banks this week because of heavy rain and the release of water from overflowing dams in neighboring India, causing floods that have displaced nearly 250,000 people in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Officials say more than 1 million people are affected, with crops and businesses destroyed and many unable to leave their homes.
“This polio campaign comes at a critical time,” the NEOC said in a statement. “Widespread flooding across parts of Pakistan has increased the risk of polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases spreading to previously unaffected areas.”
Officials said floodwaters and crowded conditions in displacement camps have heightened the likelihood of virus transmission, making it even more urgent to vaccinate every child under five.
Pakistan confirmed two new polio cases in its northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province this week, bringing the total number of children affected by the crippling virus this year to 23. The country and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two where polio is still endemic.
Pakistan made significant progress in curbing the virus, with annual cases dropping from around 20,000 in the early 1990s to just eight in 2018. It reported six cases in 2023 and only one in 2021, but saw a sharp resurgence in 2024 with 74 cases recorded.
Polio is a highly infectious and incurable disease that can cause lifelong paralysis. The only effective protection is through repeated doses of the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) for every child under five during each campaign, alongside timely completion of all routine immunizations.
The NEOC urged parents and caregivers to ensure that “every child must receive two drops of the polio vaccine during every campaign, alongside their routine childhood vaccinations, to stop the virus from spreading further.”
Past efforts to eradicate the virus have been repeatedly undermined by vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners, who claim immunization is a foreign plot to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western espionage.
Militant groups have also frequently targeted polio vaccination teams and the security personnel assigned to protect them, particularly in KP and Balochistan.
Pakistan remains one of just two countries in the world where the polio virus is still endemic, alongside Afghanistan, according to the World Health Organization.
