Polio Outbreak in Pakistan Increases Global Eradication Risks

An outbreak of polio in Pakistan continues to increase due to a Taliban ban on vaccination, according to Reuters.

The alleged ban is seen as a threat to derail the progress made this year to wipe out polio globally. Pakistani health groups have been attacked repeatedly after the Taliban decried vaccines as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims, thus imposing bans on inoculation in 2012. Dozens on children under the age of two have been contaminated and crippled by polio in the past six months. Most of these children are residing in North Warziristan, a region near the Afghan border, cordoned off by the Taliban.

"We have entered a phase that we were all worried about and were afraid might happen," Elias Durry, head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters "The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long as we have no means of reaching these children and immunizing them to interrupt virus transmission, it could jeopardize everything that has been done so far - not only in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe."

The polio virus has been an endemic condition in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, global cases have already dropped by more than 99.9 percent in less than three decades, according to Onislam. In 2013, there have already been 236 polio cases reported globally; 43 of which are from Pakistan. 

Tariq Bhutta of the Pakistan Pediatric Association said "there was little prospect that the militant Islamist group would change its stance. He said attacks on health teams attempting to reach children to immunize them were becoming both more frequent and more violent." "The vaccination teams are still going out, but at risk to their lives," he told Reuters. "People can come up on motorbikes and shoot them, and they've also started attacking the police put there to protect the vaccination teams", he added.