Islamabad, March 5 – Pakistan reported its first case of wild poliovirus in a four-year-old child from the Bello Union Council in Sujawal district of Sindh province on Thursday, local media reported.
According to Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication (NEOC), the case was detected through the polio surveillance network and the Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, confirmed it. Dawn, Pakistan's leading daily, reported this.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where wild poliovirus remains endemic. Polio workers in Pakistan have been frequently targeted in attacks, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
Approximately one million children were not vaccinated, and 53,000 refusals were reported during the first polio campaign conducted in Pakistan in 2026, local media reported. During the campaign, the largest share of refusals – 58 per cent – were reported in Karachi, Pakistan.
Polio drops were administered to over 44.3 million children in Pakistan. The data indicates that the polio campaign achieved household coverage of 98 per cent, with only two per cent of children remaining unvaccinated, Dawn reported. However, the number of children who did not receive polio drops is still significant, considering Pakistan's population.
Overall, 0.95 million children were reported as unvaccinated during the polio campaign launched in Pakistan in 2026. Among these, a large proportion of children (0.67 million) did not receive polio vaccination because they were not at home. During the campaign, polio drops were administered to 2.5 million children who were likely present at home, but not vaccinated at the time.
"233,000 children were reported as unvaccinated due to security constraints, community boycotts, and snow-bound areas," an official stated. He mentioned that the total number of unvaccinated children included 184,000 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and approximately 50,000 children remained unreachable in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan (PoGB) due to snow-bound regions and the non-conduct of campaigns.
The official stated that the polio eradication campaign was postponed in Mastung, Gwadar, Chagai, and Awaran areas of Balochistan due to security reasons, Dawn reported. "0.14 per cent of the total targeted children were reported as refusals, with 31,000 refusals from Karachi, forming the largest share."
According to the statement, polio drops were administered to more than 22.9 million children in Punjab, over 10.5 million in Sindh, over 7.13 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and over 2.3 million in Balochistan.
During the polio campaign, more than 455,000 children were vaccinated in Islamabad, approximately 261,000 children were vaccinated in PoGB, and more than 673,000 children were vaccinated in PoJK.
