ISLAMABAD: Pakistan marking one-year polio-free for the first time ever in the country’s hisotry. The last infection of the wild poliovirus was recorded on January 27, 2021, according to officials. To formally eradicate the disease, a nation must be polio-free for three consecutive years — but even 12 months is a long time in a country where vaccination teams are in the crosshairs of a simmering insurgency.
Since the Taliban takeover of neighbouring Afghanistan, the Pakistan version of the movement has become emboldened and its fighters frequently target polio teams.
Nigeria officially eradicated wild polio in 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only countries where the disease — which causes crippling paralysis — is still endemic.
Spread through faeces and saliva, the virus has historically thrived in the blurred borderlands between the South Asian nations, where state infrastructure is weak and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have carved out a home.
In 2014 it was largely ousted by an army offensive, its fighters retreating across the porous border with Afghanistan. But last year overall militant attacks surged by 56 per cent according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, reversing a six-year downward trend. The largest number of assaults came in August, coinciding with the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
Pakistan s newspapers are regularly peppered with stories of police slain as they guard polio teams — and just this week a constable was gunned down in Kohat — 80 kilometres (50 miles) southwest of Mardan.
Pakistani media has reported as many as 70 polio workers killed in militant attacks since 2012 — mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Pakistan anti-polio drives have been running since 1994, with up to 260,000 vaccinators staging regular waves of regional inoculation campaigns. But on the fringes of the country, the teams often face scepticism. “In certain areas of Pakistan, it was considered as a Western conspiracy,” explained Shahzad Baig — head of the national polio eradication programme.
