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Pakistan began its last national vaccination campaign of the year on Monday to protect 45 million children from polio after a surge in new cases hampered efforts to stop the disease, officials said.
According to World Health OrganizationPakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the potentially deadly, paralyzing virus has not been stopped,
Pakistan has reported 63 confirmed cases since January.
Ayesha Raza Farooq, Adviser to Prime Minister on Polio Eradication Program, said the polio drive will continue till December 22.
“As a mother, I appeal to you to open your doors to health workers,” she said.
Pakistan regularly launches such campaigns despite violence affecting medical staff overseeing vaccinations and the security forces accompanying them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Authorities deployed thousands of police to protect health workers after intelligence reports that insurgents might attack them. But gunmen opened fire on police escorting polio workers in Karak, a city in restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on Monday, killing a policeman and wounding a health worker, local police official Ayaz Khan said.
More than 200 polio workers and police officers assigned to protect them have been killed since the 1990s, according to health officials and authorities.
The latest campaign against polio started the day after the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif he met with medical staff and promised that Pakistan would win the war against polio.
Afghanistan reported at least 23 confirmed cases in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.
In September, the Afghan Taliban abruptly ended a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Afghanistan, a devastating step to eradicate polio because the virus is one of the most contagious in the world and any unvaccinated group of children where the virus spreads could undo years of progress.