More than 100,000 health workers fanned out across Pakistan on Monday, stepping up a drive to eliminate the polio virus this year from one of its last bastions, despite continuing militant threats to vaccination teams.
Pakistan accounts for more than 70 per cent of the world’s cases of polio, a virus that can cause lifelong paralysis and is now endemic in only two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“We have intensified our efforts,” said Asher Ali, a project manager in the southern city of Karachi for Rotary International Pakistan, one of the groups involved in the effort. “If we take normal action, it will never be eradicated.” Pakistan’s polio cases are declining, with just 54 cases of wild polio virus reported last year, down more than 80 per cent from 2014, when the country suffered a large spike in cases.
The latest immunisation push aims to finish vaccinating every child in the country by the end of May. Efforts to eliminate polio in Pakistan have been complicated in recent years, as polio workers have faced attacks by militants who say the health teams are Western spies, or that the vaccines they administer are intended to sterilise children.
