ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will vaccinate more than 31 million children under five across 115 high-risk districts from Sept. 21-27 in a nationwide polio campaign aimed at closing immunity gaps and curbing continued transmission, officials said Tuesday.

Pakistan remains one of the countries where wild poliovirus continues to circulate, with four confirmed wild poliovirus type 1 cases reported so far in 2026: three in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and one in southern Sindh.

September’s sub-national campaign will cover high-risk and hotspot areas in Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Polio Eradication Initiative said in a statement.

The drive will be synchronized with vaccination activities in neighboring Afghanistan in an effort to interrupt cross-border transmission, while more than 273,000 frontline workers will take part in the Pakistani campaign.

“The September campaign is an important opportunity to reach more than 31 million children in high-risk areas and strengthen population immunity against poliovirus,” Ayesha Raza Farooq, the prime minister’s focal person for polio eradication, said.

“I urge parents and caregivers to support vaccination teams and ensure that all children under five are vaccinated during the campaign, even if they have received polio drops before.”

The polio initiative said continued detection of the virus through acute flaccid paralysis surveillance and environmental sampling showed the need to maintain high vaccination coverage and rapidly respond to areas where the virus was found.

Pakistan has conducted repeated nationwide and targeted vaccination campaigns as it seeks to halt the transmission of wild poliovirus, which can cause irreversible paralysis. More than 45 million children under five were targeted in three nationwide campaigns earlier this year.

However, 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.

According to government data, Pakistan has reduced polio cases by 99.8 percent from an estimated 20,000 cases in the early 1990s to 31 last year.