ISLAMABAD (AP) – Pakistan detected one more polio case in the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, raising the country’s tally of the infectious disease to 50 cases this year, officials said yesterday.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where the spread of polio has never been stopped.
The sudden rise in cases of polio, which is an infection caused by a virus that mostly affects children under five, has hampered the country’s yearslong efforts to make it a polio-free state.
The latest case was detected in Tank, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where militants often target polio workers and police assigned for anti-polio campaigns, according to a statement by the National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication.
Pakistan has reported 50 such cases this year, it said.
Most polio cases this year were reported in the restive southwestern Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces bordering Afghanistan, where 23 confirmed cases have surfaced, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). That’s up from six cases in 2023.
WHO director for the Eastern Mediterranean Hamid Jafari said last week the forced repatriation of Afghans from Pakistan was a major setback to polio eradication and has led to a “massive and unpredictable movement” of people within the two countries and across borders.
“The virus moved with these populations,” he told a virtual discussion hosted by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
