Pakistani authorities launched a new nationwide anti-polio drive on Monday, November 28, 2022 amid an upsurge in new cases among children.

It is the sixth anti-polio campaign this year and will last for five days, aiming to immunize children under the age of 5 in high-risk areas.

The latest campaign was aimed at Islamabad and in the high-risk districts in eastern Punjab and southwestern Baluchistan province. A similar campaign will be launched in the northwest in the first week of December.

Pakistan regularly launches polio campaigns despite attacks on workers and police assigned to inoculation drives.

Militants falsely assert that the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children. Since April, Pakistan has registered twenty new polio cases and the outbreak has been seen as a setback to the efforts to eradicate the disease which can cause severe paralysis in children.

Pakistan came close to eradicating polio last year, when only one case was reported.

Since then, the new cases have been reported in the northwest region of Pakistan, forcing the government to launch anti-polio drives at small intervals in high-risk areas across the country. The last of such anti-polio campaigns was launched earlier this month.

Pakistan’s anti-polio campaigns are also supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which pledged $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide last month.

The money will be used for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The foundation stated that the initiative is aimed at eradicating the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the last two endemic countries.

The World Health Assembly adopted a resolution for the global eradication of polio in 1988. According to the World Health Organization, wild poliovirus cases have decreased by more than 99% since then.

Polio Rears Its Ugly Head In Indonesia

Indonesia records new polio cases after the highly contagious disease was declared eradicated in the country less than a decade ago. Polio was eradicated in Indonesia in 2014.

Four children have been infected so far. The virus was first detected in October in a 7-year-old boy suffering from partial paralysis in the province of Aceh near Sigli, and since then three other cases have been detected.

This prompted a mass immunization and information drive which commenced today November, 28, 2022.

Maxi Rein Rondonuwu, the Health Ministry’s Director General for disease control and prevention, divulged that the campaign aims to vaccinate some 1.2 million children in the Aceh province.

Officials say that polio immunization rates in the conservative province are well behind the rest of the country, with efforts hampered by widespread misinformation that the vaccine is incompatible with religious beliefs, among other things.

The government has also been prioritizing COVID-19 vaccinations since they became available.

According to the World Health Organization, polio predominantly affects children under the age of 5. However, unvaccinated people of any ages can contract the disease.