Health workers are braving freezing temperatures this week to administer polio vaccinations in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), as Pakistan grapples with a surge in cases recorded nationwide last year.
Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan are the only countries where polio is endemic, and militants have for decades targeted vaccination teams and their security escorts.
A police officer guarding polio vaccinators in the northwest was shot dead by militants on Monday, the first day of the weeklong annual campaign after an inoculation team was ambushed in the Bakarabad area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Khyber district.
In AJK, health worker Manzoor Ahmad trudged up snowy mountains as temperatures dipped to minus six degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) to administer polio vaccinations in the region.
“It is a mountainous, hard area… we arrive here for polio vaccination despite the three feet of snowfall,” Ahmad, who heads the polio campaign in AJK told AFP.
Huge risk
Social worker Mehnaz, who goes by one name and has been helping the vaccinators since 2018, said the difficult climate poses a huge risk to the vaccination teams.
“We have no monthly salary… we come here to give polio drop to the children despite the glaciers and avalanches,” she told AFP.
“We risk our lives and leave our children at home.”
The challenge is larger this year for the country with a population of 240 million after it recorded at least 73 polio cases in 2024 — a sharp increase from just six cases the year before.
Health workers aim to vaccinate approximately 1,700 children within a week in the town of Surgan, around 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Muzaffarabad, the capital of AJK.
“Our target is to give polio drops to 750,000 children under five. 4,000 polio teams visit house-to-house,” Ahmad said.
“There have been no polio cases in AJK for the last 24 years,” he added with pride.
PM launches 2025’s first polio inoculation drive
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday, January 2, launched a maiden nationwide anti-polio campaign for the year 2025 by administering polio drops to children under the age of five.
Addressing the launching ceremony, PM Shehbaz reaffirmed his government’s determination to eliminate the crippling disease from the country.
He said that the national polio vaccination drive would target millions of children in the country to save their future and health. The nationwide anti-polio campaign will run from February 3 to 9.
The premier hoped that the dedicated teams would work day and night to eradicate the disease, and would reach the far flung areas and villages, adding these teams would successfully meet the huge national responsibility by utilising their complete energies.
Attacks on vaccinators
Polio can easily be prevented by the oral administration of a few drops of vaccine, but authorities’ rigorous efforts towards polio eradication face significant challenges, particularly in areas where insecurity, misinformation, and parental refusals hinder vaccination campaigns.
In more recent years the attacks have focused on vulnerable police escorts accompanying the vaccinators as they go door-to-door.
The country has witnessed rising militant attacks since the Taliban returned to power in neighbouring Afghanistan.
More than 1,600 people were killed in attacks in 2024 — the deadliest year in almost a decade — according to the Centre for Research and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based analysis group.
Islamabad accuses Kabul’s new rulers of failing to rout militants organising on Afghan soil, a charge the Taliban government routinely denies.
In November, at least seven people — including five children — were killed in a bombing targeting police gathered to guard vaccinators near a school in southwestern Balochistan province.
