Pakistan, Afghanistan revive fight against polio amid global spurt in cases

Pakistan and Afghanistan will launch simultaneous polio vaccination campaigns next month in renewed efforts to eradicate the infectious disease.

Since January, Pakistan has recorded 16 cases of poliovirus, including 12 in the province of Balochistan, which shares a border with Afghanistan.

Three of the infected children have died.

Speaking at a press conference, as reported by Dawn, Balochistan Emergency Operation Centre Coordinator Inamul Haq Qureshi said that the rising number of cases can be attributed to three factors: “population movement leading to the spread of the virus, refusal by some parents to vaccinate their children, and nutritional deficiencies and weakened immunity in children.”

On that same day, Dawn reported that a two-year-old child in Pakistan’s Sindh province was paralysed after contracting type-1 wild poliovirus.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where the type-1 wild poliovirus is endemic, after Nigeria was declared polio-free in August 2020, having recorded no new cases of the strain since 2016.

Public health officials declared it a success and a sign that the world was moving towards eliminating the virus, like with smallpox in 1977.

Between 2017 and mid-2018, Pakistan had reported the lowest number of cases of wild polio virus in its population, and “the Polio Eradication Initiative saw multiple months without a single case – a sign that the end was in sight,” according to a government report in 2020.

However, by late 2018, the number of cases surged, largely fuelled by misinformation and disinformation that spread through social media. There were also repeated attacks on polio health workers and security personnel guarding them by militant groups that are against vaccination.

“As recently as 30 years ago, wild poliovirus paralysed more than 350,000 children in more than 125 countries every year,” the World Health Organisation reported back in 2019.

“Today, the virus has been beaten back to less than 30 reported cases in 2018 in just two countries – Afghanistan and Pakistan – and the world stands on the cusp of an unprecedented public health success: the global eradication of a human disease for only the second time in history.”

The virus mainly affects children under the age of five, leading to irreversible paralysis. In the worst cases, it can lead to death, as it can affect the child’s breathing muscles.

In very rare cases, vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV), a mutation of the vaccine, can cause paralysis in unvaccinated people. In the last few years, there has been a global resurgence of this type of polio, with the latest case of a two-year-old boy contracting the virus in India.

“As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio,” the WHO warned. “Failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in a global resurgence of the disease.”

Last week, a ten-month-old child in Gaza was confirmed to have wild poliovirus after having been declared polio-free since the late 1990s.

Over the last ten months, as its water and sanitation systems have been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military, more cases are expected to be reported.