Afghanistan tied to country’s polio spike

In his response to a countrywide surge in polio cases, caretaker Health Minister Dr Nadeem Jan on Friday claimed that 90 per cent of the virus cases in Pakistan were “imported from Afghanistan”.

His remarks came after two more samples, collected from Balochistan’s Dera Bugti and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Peshawar, tested positive for the poliovirus in the country – just a day after this year’s third case surfaced.

The health minister, in an interview to a private channel, said: “Of the 34 samples that we have received, 90% have come from Afghanistan … our own are even less than 10%.”

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According to an official at the polio laboratory of the National Institute of Health (NIH), both viruses that had been found in the sewage samples were similar to Afghanistan’s poliovirus.

Pakistan and Afghanistan were the only countries where the poliovirus remained endemic. According to authorities, the transmission of wild poliovirus has been restricted to seven districts in the south of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, namely Tank, Bannu, North Waziristan, South Waziristan Upper, South Waziristan Lower, Dera Ismail Khan and Lakki Marwat.

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In a report released in August, the World Health Organisation said that since Jan 2021, all reported cases were from the seven polio-endemic districts in southern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Earlier this week, the total number of cases in Pakistan this year increased to five after three new ones were reported in Peshawar, Bannu, and Dera Bugti.