Pakistan has emerged as a focal point of global polio eradication efforts following this year’s World Polio Day on Oct. 24. The day came at the heel of a deadly bomb attack by the Taliban on an immunization team on Oct. 7 in the city of Peshawar. This was the latest of a series of attacks led by the Taliban against health workers in Pakistan that began when the militant group infamously banned polio vaccination in areas under its control in June of last year.
Poliomyelitis, better known as polio, was one of the most crippling childhood diseases of the 20th century. Vaccines developed in 1955 by Jonas Salk and in 1988 by Albert Sabin, along with the launch of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) drive for routine worldwide immunization under the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in 1988, are credited with having reduced polio incidence around the world by 99 percent.
Apart from Pakistan, the WHO identifies Afghanistan and Nigeria as two other countries where polio is endemic, meaning its transmission has never been stopped. However, the political high-profile of the Taliban and the extremeness of their ban have made Pakistan the focus of rather more discussion this World Polio Day than other countries that have reported outbreaks. Dr. Elias Durry, head of the GPEI, was among those who chose to highlight Pakistan and frame its situation as an issue of child rights.
“Close to 90 percent of the children paralysed by polio this year come from the areas in which there are problems of inaccessibility due to the ban on vaccination, or a fear of violence against polio teams,” Dr. Durry wrote in The Express Tribune on Oct. 24. While other areas of the country took great strides toward polio eradication, he wrote, the trend did not hold true for the Taliban-controlled Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the months since the ban was introduced, making it clear that blame lies in children being systematically denied their right to be vaccinated.
Saira Afzal Tarar, Pakistan’s Minister of State for Health Regulations, also announced that the government will include polio vaccination on the agenda for talks with the Taliban at a function held for World Polio Day. On the same day, the Pakistan Ulema Council issued a fatwa declaring that polio vaccination is not forbidden in Islam.
The Taliban instituted the vaccination ban in protest over US drone strikes in FATA. The group has also fanned longstanding rumours that vaccination campaigns, many of which are funded by the US International Development Agency, act as plots to sterilize Muslims or as covers for spies. The rumours gained traction in 2011 upon the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency used a sham vaccination project to help locate Osama bin Laden.
Other topics discussed at various events held around the world on World Polio Day include polio cases reported in Ethiopia and Somalia and a possible outbreak in Syria that is currently under investigation by the WHO.
