KARACHI: Pakistan’s nationwide polio immunization campaign continued successfully for a third consecutive day on Wednesday, with more than 25.4 million children under the age of five vaccinated in the first two days, according to the National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC).

The week-long campaign, launched earlier this week, aims to reach over 45 million children across all provinces and territories as part of Pakistan’s ongoing efforts to eradicate the paralytic disease. Pakistan remains one of only two countries in the world where wild poliovirus is still endemic, alongside Afghanistan.

According to the NEOC, 14.3 million children have been vaccinated in Punjab province, 5.02 million in Sindh, 3.77 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 1.45 million in Balochistan. In Islamabad, health workers reached over 203,000 children, while 187,000 were vaccinated in Gilgit-Baltistan and 481,000 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

“Integrated and sustained efforts are underway to ensure that every eligible child receives the life-saving vaccine,” the NEOC said in a statement. It added that teams are going door-to-door and setting up transit vaccination points nationwide.

The NEOC urged parents to welcome vaccination teams and ensure that all children under five receive the drops, warning that polio “is a dangerous disease that can cause lifelong paralysis.” It emphasized that the campaign’s success depends on active community participation and parental cooperation.

While Pakistan 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.

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.

On Tuesday, a paramilitary Levies soldier deployed to protect a polio vaccination team was killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.