Pakistan's polio war faces Trump's WHO snub, surging militancy
The 12-year-old polio victim from the north-western Pakistani town of Mardan can barely even walk without a special pair of shoes customized for kids with paralysed limbs.
'I like playing with other kids, but can't run like them,' said the child whose family migrated from Afghanistan to live in Pakistan - like millions of others in 1970s - to flee the advancing Russian army.
The family has since been struggling, living in refugee camps and toiling to meet ends before settling down in the shanty town with narrow alleys and dirt roads.
'Life has never been easy and with a paralysed kid it becomes even harder,' said Hasina Khan, Abid's mother who looks after four kids after the death of her husband a few years ago.
The young mother, in her 40s, blames herself for the plight of her son. It was she who refused to get her son vaccinated after an argument with health workers.
'I regret that,' says the grieving mother, who has been making sure her other kids get vaccinated every time a campaign is run by the health department.
Pakistan, a South Asian nuclear power with a population of around 240 million, is, along with neighbouring Afghanistan, one of the last polio hotspots in the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The country runs periodic immunization drives funded by the WHO and the US' Gates Foundation to vaccinate kids under the age of 5 to save them from the virus that cripples its victims for life.
But despite several years of the campaign - and once being on the verge of eradicating the virus - polio has surged to an alarming level last year when at least 74 new cases were reported.
That compares with only six cases in 2023, a year when hopes of complete eradication emerged.
Pakistani officials listed the lack of access to areas hit by the Islamist militancy and the cross border movement of people with Afghanistan as some of the major factors behind the surge.
'We plan to launch coordinated campaigns with the Taliban government in Afghanistan,' said Zia ur Rehman, a spokesman for the polio eradication team.
Misconceptions among the communities and illiteracy on both sides of the border further complicate the situation, resulting in parents refusing vaccination, Rehman added.
In the town of Mardan, health worker Najia Wajid feels and faces those misconceptions every time she takes part in a door-to-door vaccination drive.
'People don't see any immediate return for waiting in queues at the health centres and lining up their kids when vaccine workers visit their place,' said Wajid.
Their mindset is driven by the violent opposition by Taliban militants and some clerics to the vaccination, calling it the West's conspiracy to sterilize Muslims.
In a WhatsApp message to dpa, the Pakistani Taliban said they don't target health care and the polio campaigns, but the reality is starkly the opposite.
Nearly 150 health workers and police officers guarding them have been killed during vaccination drives since 2012.
'That's where the problem lies. When people see militants attacking the campaign and clerics opposing it, they start doubting it,' another health worker Jahangir Syed said in Mardan.
Apart from violence by the Pakistani Taliban who have killed nearly 80,000 of their countrymen in decades of violence, the South Asian nation's polio war is up against a new challenge.
US President Donald Trump's recent announcement to withdraw funding to the WHO is likely to impact health-care projects all across the global south including in Pakistan.
Though Pakistani officials played down an anticipated impact, a WHO spokesman in Geneva said any reduction in commitment from any partner endangers the goal of achieving a polio-free world.
'The world must remain steadfast and united in the common cause... of a world and future free from polio,' Oliver Rosenbauer said without naming or blaming Trump.
Whatever motivates Trump's move or the Taliban's reasons for targeting the drive, mothers like Hasina would desperately like the world to win the war against the crippling virus.
'I wish it doesn't happen to anyone's child,' said the mother, looking at her child as he seeks her help to put on his prescription shoes.
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