2 more KP polio cases take Pakistan’s 2024 tally to 52

Two more polio cases were confirmed to be detected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan on Friday, taking the country’s tally for the current year to 52.

Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, alongside Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic. Despite global efforts to eradicate the virus, challenges such as security issues, vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation have slowed progress.

The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at Islamabad’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirmed the detection of two more wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) cases.

The lab confirmed the cases from DI Khan where a boy and a girl were affected.

It said genetic sequencing of the samples collected from the children was underway.

DI Khan, one of the seven polio-endemic districts of southern KP, has now reported five polio cases this year.

Of the 52 cases in the country this year, 24 are from Balochistan, 13 from Sindh, 13 from KP and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.

On Tuesday, the year’s 50th polio case was reported from KP’s Tank district.

Last week, the year’s 49th case was reported from Balochistan’s Jaffarabad district in a 15-month-old male child.

Earlier this month, health officials insisted that unvaccinated children were hindering the progress of the government’s fight against polio in KP.

They told Dawn that in the last door-to-door anti-polio campaign from October 28 to November 3, the vaccinators missed only 1.5 per cent of the targeted children in the province due to parental refusal or the children’s unavailability at home.

The officials said of the total of 6.38 million targeted children in 30 districts, 78,355 missed polio vaccines due to their absence from home during the anti-polio teams’ visit, while 17,479 didn’t receive the vaccine due to refusal or reluctance of their parents.

They said that the numbers were a cause of concern as the polio eradication programme was meant to inoculate all eligible populations to eliminate the vaccine-preventable childhood ailment.