ISLAMABAD (AP) – Pakistan began its last nationwide vaccination campaign for the year to protect 45 million children from polio after a surge in new cases hampered efforts to stop the disease, officials said.
According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the potentially fatal, paralysing virus hasn’t been stopped,
Pakistan has reported 63 confirmed cases since January.
The prime minister’s adviser for the polio eradication programme Ayesha Raza Farooq said the anti-polio drive will continue until December 22. “As a mother, I am appealing to you to open your doors for health workers,” she said.
Pakistan regularly launches such campaigns despite violence affecting medical personnel who oversee the vaccinations and security forces escorting them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilise children.
Authorities deployed thousands of police officers to protect health workers following intelligence reports that insurgents could target them.
However, gunmen opened fire on Monday on police escorting polio workers in Karak, a city in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing a police officer and wounding a health worker, police official Ayaz Khan said.
Also on Monday, a gunman riding on a motorcycle shot and wounded a police officer assigned to escort polio workers from a health facility in the northwestern city of Bannu, said local police chief Hamid Khan.
No one has claimed responsibility for the twin attacks. But more than 200 polio workers and police assigned for their protection have been killed since the 1990s.
