The Taliban announced Monday the launch of a polio vaccination campaign in 16 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces that seeks to immunize nearly 5.4 million children, after the World Health Organization (WHO) noted in December that the country had made «significant progress» in the fight against the disease.
The Afghan Ministry of Health has indicated that it has plans to carry out the campaign in 178 districts across the country and has called on Islamic scholars and members of the security forces to cooperate with medical workers in a bid to prevent further attacks on the vaccination campaign, the official Bakhtar News agency reported.
The WHO said in December that only two polio cases were reported in 2022, compared with 56 in 2020. That same month, the Taliban launched a campaign to immunize seven million children in 26 of the country’s 34 provinces.
Polio, a highly contagious disease that mainly affects children, is transmitted mainly by the fecal-oral route, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The virus is endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, after Nigeria declared its eradication in 2020.
Vaccination campaigns have faced difficulties in Afghanistan and Pakistan due to conspiracy theories that immunization causes infertility or that medical workers are spies, which has led to numerous attacks against them or agents who are deployed to reinforce their security. Before seizing power in 2021, the Taliban banned such campaigns in areas under their control.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
