Islamabad, November 24 (IANS). Three new cases of polio have been reported in Pakistan on Sunday. With this, the total number of active cases in the country has increased to 55 this year.
Pakistan’s huge and unending struggle to eradicate polio continues. The National Institutes of Health’s Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication has confirmed the presence of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in three districts, including Dera Ismail Khan, Zhob and Jaffrabad.
Six cases of polio have been reported this year in Dera Ismail Khan, a district in the country’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Meanwhile, three and two cases have been reported in the south-western districts of Job and Jaffrabad, respectively.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio is still spreading.
Polio vaccination campaigns in restive areas including Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been thwarted in the past and have even resulted in the deaths of health workers.
The World Health Organization has warned that the detection of new cases in Pakistan is an alarming sign, putting children in many districts at serious risk.
However, the Pakistan polio program claims that large-scale vaccination campaigns have been conducted from January 2024. Yet many analysts have questioned the government’s continued failure to stop the spread of the polio virus.
Resistance in the country towards the polio vaccination campaign is believed to have increased when the US intelligence agency CIA conducted a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign to track down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, was killed in 2011 during a US Navy operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
–IANS
FZ/AKJ
