Pakistan has registered seven new polio cases, raising the number of those affected by the crippling disease this year to 194 and edging closer to the nation’s own record number of 199 in 2001, a senior health official said Friday.
All of the new cases were from the North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, where it has been impossible to launch anti-polio campaigns because of threats from militants, said Rana Mohammad Safdar from the National Institute of Health in Islamabad.
“We are concerned over it,” Safdar told The Associated Press. “Lab tests two days ago confirmed these new cases.”
Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is endemic. The highly contagious virus is transmitted in unsanitary conditions but is easily fended off with a vaccine.
However, efforts to eradicate it are hampered by the Taliban, who have banned immunizations and attacked polio vaccination teams across Pakistan. Militants accuse polio workers of acting as spies for the United States and claim the vaccine makes boys sterile.
About 60 polio workers or police escorting polio teams have been killed in Pakistan since 2012, said Safdar.