ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) said on Tuesday that over 8 million children were vaccinated on the first day of a week-long anti-polio drive that aims to target 31 million children across the country, urging parents to get their children inoculated.

The sub-national campaign is being carried out in 115 districts across Pakistan. The drive will be carried out from Sept. 21 till Sept. 27, with over 273,000 polio workers going door-to-door to vaccinate children.

“Around 8.325 million children were vaccinated on the first day of the campaign,” the NEOC said.

The NEOC said 2.3 million children have been administered polio drops across 13 Punjab districts, while 3 million children have been inoculated across 30 districts of Sindh.

In the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province’s 37 districts, 2.18 million children have been provided anti-polio drops while more than 594,000 children have been inoculated across 30 districts of Balochistan.

Around 151,000 children were administered polio drops in Islamabad while over 41,000 were given the dose in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan region on the first day.

Pakistan has been grappling with poliovirus over the past couple of years. The highly contagious and incurable disease can cause lifelong paralysis and, in some cases, death.

Pakistan has reported four wild poliovirus type 1 cases so far this year, including three in KP province and one in Sindh. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where polio remains endemic.

The ongoing vaccination drive is being synchronized with vaccination activities in neighboring Afghanistan in an effort to interrupt cross-border transmission, according to Pakistani health authorities.

Pakistan’s polio campaigns have long been hampered by misinformation and vaccine refusals, as well as militant attacks on vaccination workers and police officers assigned to protect them, particularly in KP and Balochistan. Militant groups falsely claim polio vaccines are part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children or cause infertility.