PESHAWAR: A paramilitary Levies soldier deployed to protect a polio vaccination team was killed in Pakistan’s restive northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police said on Tuesday.
The attack took place in the Matta Town of Swat Valley while a week-long nationwide campaign to inoculate 45 million children was underway, according to District Administration Official Amjad Khan.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where polio remains endemic. While the country has made major gains since the 1990s when annual cases exceeded 20,000, reducing the toll to eight by 2018, vaccine hesitancy, fueled by misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners, continues to undermine efforts.
“The attackers opened fire on the security team while women polio workers were inside a house administering vaccinations,” he told Arab News.
“The deceased identified as Abdul Kabir succumbed to injuries on the spot.”
Pakistan recorded 74 cases in 2024, a sharp rise from six in 2023 and just one in 2021. This year, it has reported 29 polio cases so far, including 18 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, nine from Sindh and one each from Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan.
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 for every child under five during each campaign, alongside timely completion of all routine immunizations.
Pakistan’s efforts to eliminate poliovirus have been hampered by parental refusals, widespread misinformation and repeated attacks on anti-polio workers by militant groups. In remote and volatile areas, vaccination teams often operate under police protection, though security personnel themselves have also been targeted and killed in attacks.
