With another child testing positive for polio in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the total number of cases reported this year has risen to seven in the country. All the cases have been reported from KP and the erstwhile tribal districts in the country’s north.

The Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) for Polio Eradication in KP said that a seven-month old girl from the Mir Ali area of South Waziristan has tested positive for the virus.

This takes the number of confirmed polio cases in the northern province to seven.

The emergence of cases in KP continues despite the province being part of a nationwide innoculation campaign that has seen polio workers go from door-to-door to administer drops to children under the age of five.

On May 23, Pakistan launched another nationwide polio vaccination programme, aimed at reaching as many as 43.3 million children under the age of five across the 156 districts of the country. The campaign ran for seven days in major cities and for five days in small cities.

Only last week, two more cases had been reported from the North Waziristan area. In April, the first case of polio in the country for 15 months was reported from the same area. In 2020, KP reported 22 cases, while no wild poliovirus cases were recorded in the province last year.

Parents refusal to get children vaccinated against the disease has been cited as the reason for the increase in polio cases in the province.