Pakistani authorities will launch a new polio vaccination campaign targeting more than six million children under the age of five in 39 districts on Monday after confirming several positive results.
The Pakistani Ministry of Health said the vaccination campaign will run from February 13-17 in districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – Bannu, Dera Ismail Jan, Tank, Laki Maruat, North Waziristan, Lower South Waziristan and Upper South Waziristan – Punjab, Lahore and Faisalabad.
In addition, «partial» campaigns will be carried out in 30 districts, some of them on the border with Afghanistan, as well as in Afghan refugee camps and among at-risk populations, according to the Pakistani newspaper ‘Dawn’.
The Ministry of Health has indicated that the campaign will be launched after confirming two positive environmental samples in Lahore, the first of which was detected on January 19 and has genetic links to poliovirus in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar.
This is the first evidence of cross-border transmission in more than a year, and Health Minister Abdulqadir Patel has called on parents to ensure that their children are vaccinated against polio.
«Poliovirus on either side of the border is a threat to children in both countries. Only repeated oral doses of polio vaccine can guarantee lasting protection,» he said, while stressing that «vaccination teams will continue to go door-to-door as long as necessary.»
Polio, a highly contagious disease that mainly affects children, is mainly transmitted 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)
