Gunmen kill two security officials assigned to protect polio workers in southwest Pakistan
The attack occurred in a residential area of Mastung, a district in Balochistan, according to Mohammad Arif, a local police official. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The health workers, who were vaccinating children in a nearby street, were unharmed, the official said.
Shahid Rind, a government spokesman in Balochistan, denounced the attack, which came two days after Pakistan launched a weeklong nationwide vaccination campaign aimed at protecting 45 million children from polio.
According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the spread of the natural version of the potentially fatal, paralyzing virus has never been stopped. There are ongoing outbreaks in at least six African countries prompted by mutated viruses linked to the oral polio vaccine.
Police and health workers are often attacked by militants who falsely claim that vaccination efforts are part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children.
Pakistan saw a surge in polio cases last year, with 74 reported cases compared to just one in 2021. The South Asian country reported just six cases since January.
Since the 1990s, more than 200 polio workers and the police assigned to protect them have been killed in attacks.
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Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Polio lost, but fake records & imperfect vax helped it rear its ugly head
Karachi: For the past decade, Sughra Ayaz has traveled door to door in southeastern Pakistan, pleading with parents to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as part of a global campaign to wipe out the paralytic disease. She hears their demands and fears. Some are practical - families need basics like food and water more than vaccines. Others are simply unfounded - the oral doses are meant to sterilize their kids. Amid rampant misinformation and immense pressure for the campaign to succeed, Ayaz said, some managers have instructed workers to falsely mark children as immunized. And the vaccines, which must be kept cold, aren't always stored correctly, she added. Productivity Tool Zero to Hero in Microsoft Excel: Complete Excel guide By Metla Sudha Sekhar View Program Finance Introduction to Technical Analysis & Candlestick Theory By Dinesh Nagpal View Program Finance Financial Literacy i e Lets Crack the Billionaire Code By CA Rahul Gupta View Program Digital Marketing Digital Marketing Masterclass by Neil Patel By Neil Patel View Program Finance Technical Analysis Demystified- A Complete Guide to Trading By Kunal Patel View Program Productivity Tool Excel Essentials to Expert: Your Complete Guide By Study at home View Program Artificial Intelligence AI For Business Professionals Batch 2 By Ansh Mehra View Program "In many places, our work is not done with honesty," Ayaz said. The World Health Organization and partners embarked on their polio campaign in 1988 with the bold goal of eradication - a feat seen only once for human diseases, with smallpox in 1980. They came close several times, including in 2021, when just five cases of the natural virus were reported in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But since then, cases rebounded, hitting 99 last year, and officials have missed at least six self-imposed eradication deadlines. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the only countries where transmission of polio - which is highly infectious, affects mainly children under 5, and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours -- has never been interrupted. The worldwide campaign has focused most of its attention and funding there for the past decade. But in its quest to eliminate the disease, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has been derailed by mismanagement and what insiders describe as blind allegiance to an outdated strategy and a problematic oral vaccine, according to workers, polio experts and internal materials. Live Events Officials have falsified vaccination records, selected unqualified people to dole out drops, failed to send out teams during mass campaigns, and dismissed concerns about the oral vaccine sparking outbreaks, according to documents shared with AP by staffers from GPEI - one of the largest and most expensive public health campaigns in history, with over $20 billion spent and nearly every country in the world involved. In Afghanistan and Pakistan - which share a border, harbor widespread mistrust of vaccines, and have weakened healthcare systems and infrastructure - local staffers like Ayaz have for years flagged problems to senior managers. But those issues, along with concerns by staffers and outside health officials, have long gone unaddressed, insiders say. Officials tout the successes - 3 billion children vaccinated, an estimated 20 million people who would have been paralyzed spared - while acknowledging challenges in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remote villages are hard to reach, some cultural and religious authorities instruct against vaccination, and hundreds of polio workers and security staff have been killed because of their alignment with a Western-led initiative. Dr. Jamal Ahmed, WHO's polio director, defended progress in those two countries. "There's so many children being protected today because of the work that was done over the past 40 years," he said. "Let's not overdramatize the challenges, because that leads to children getting paralyzed."
NDTV
3 hours ago
- NDTV
"So Much Pressure": World Nearly Beat Polio But Missteps Aided Its Comeback
Karachi: For the past decade, Sughra Ayaz has traveled door to door in southeastern Pakistan, pleading with parents to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as part of a global campaign to wipe out the paralytic disease. She hears their demands and fears. Some are practical - families need basics like food and water more than vaccines. Others are simply unfounded - the oral doses are meant to sterilize their kids. Amid rampant misinformation and immense pressure for the campaign to succeed, Ayaz said, some managers have instructed workers to falsely mark children as immunized. And the vaccines, which must be kept cold, aren't always stored correctly, she added. "In many places, our work is not done with honesty," Ayaz said. The World Health Organization and partners embarked on their polio campaign in 1988 with the bold goal of eradication - a feat seen only once for human diseases, with smallpox in 1980. They came close several times, including in 2021, when just five cases of the natural virus were reported in Pakistanand Afghanistan. But since then, cases rebounded, hitting 99 last year, and officials have missed at least six self-imposed eradication deadlines. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the only countries where transmission of polio - which is highly infectious, affects mainly children under 5, and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours -- has never been interrupted. The worldwide campaign has focused most of its attention and funding there for the past decade. But in its quest to eliminate the disease, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has been derailed by mismanagement and what insiders describe as blind allegiance to an outdated strategy and a problematic oral vaccine, according to workers, polio experts and internal materials obtained by The Associated Press. Officials have falsified vaccination records, selected unqualified people to dole out drops, failed to send out teams during mass campaigns, and dismissed concerns about the oral vaccinesparking outbreaks, according to documents shared with AP by staffers from GPEI - one of the largest and most expensive public health campaigns in history, with over $20 billion spent and nearly every country in the world involved. In Afghanistan and Pakistan - which share a border, harbor widespread mistrust of vaccines, and have weakened healthcare systems and infrastructure - local staffers like Ayaz have for years flagged problems to senior managers. But those issues, along with concerns by staffers and outside health officials, have long gone unaddressed, insiders say. Officials tout the successes - 3 billion children vaccinated, an estimated 20 million people who would have been paralyzed spared - while acknowledging challenges in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remote villages are hard to reach, some cultural and religious authorities instruct against vaccination, and hundreds of polio workers and security staff have been killed because of their alignment with a Western-led initiative. Dr. Jamal Ahmed, WHO's polio director, defended progress in those two countries, citing workers' tailored response in resistant pockets. "There's so many children being protected today because of the work that was done over the past 40 years," he said. "Let's not overdramatize the challenges, because that leads to children getting paralyzed." Ahmed said he believes authorities will end the spread of polio in the next 12 to 18 months. Its latest goal for eradication is 2029. The campaign says about 45 million children in Pakistan and 11 million in Afghanistan must be vaccinated this year. Children typically need four doses of two drops each to be considered fully immunized. Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, who has served on advisory groups for WHO, the Gates Foundation and others, said campaign officials should listen to the criticism of its tactics. "Continuing blindly with the same strategies that we have relied on since eradication began is unlikely to lead to a different result," he said. Internal WHO reports reviewing vaccination drives in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past decade - given to AP by current and former staffers - show that as early as 2017, local workers were alerting significant problems to senior managers. The documents flagged multiple cases of falsified vaccination records, health workers being replaced by untrained relatives and workers improperly administering vaccines. On numerous occasions, WHO officials noted, "vaccinators did not know about vaccine management," citing failure to keep doses properly cold. They also found sloppy or falsified reporting, with workers noting "more used vaccine vials than were actually supplied." According to an August 2017 report from Kandahar, Afghanistan, local government authorities and others interfered in choosing vaccinators, "resulting in the selection of underage and illiterate volunteers." Vaccination teams worked "in a hurried manner," reports said, with "no plan for monitoring or supervision." A team in Nawzad, Afghanistan, covered just half of the intended area in 2017, with 250 households missed entirely. Village elders said no one visited for at least two years. Vaccine workers and health officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan confirmed the issues in the documents and told AP it's hard for campaign leadership to grasp the difficulties in the field. Door-to-door efforts are stymied by cultural barriers, unfounded stories about vaccines, and the region's poverty and transience. "Most of the time when we go to vaccinate and knock on the door, the head of the house or the man is not at home," said one worker, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the press. "Many people find it offensive that a stranger knocks on the door and talks to a woman." Some workers find families have moved. Occasionally, they say, the encounter abuse. "We have shared these problems with our senior officials," the worker told AP. "They know about it." In an email response to AP's questions about officials' knowledge of the issues, WHO polio director Ahmed noted "operational challenges" in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said the program has "robust monitoring and evaluation processes." Worker Ayaz described "fake finger marking" - placing the ink used to show a child is vaccinated on their pinky even when no vaccine has been given. "There is so much pressure," Ayaz said. Before the first polio vaccine was developed in 1955, the disease - spread mostly from person to person, through contaminated water and via fecal particles - was among the world's most feared, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children annually. People avoided crowded places during epidemics, and hospital wards filled with children encased in iron lungs after the virus immobilized their breathing muscles. Polio is mainly spread when people are exposed to water infected with the virus. In countries with poor sanitation, children often become infected when they come into contact with contaminated waste. WHO says that as long as a single child remains infected, kids everywhere are at risk. Eradication demands near-perfection - zero polio cases and immunizing more than 95% of children. But public health leaders and former WHO staffers say campaign efforts are far from perfect, and many question the oral vaccine. The oral vaccine - proven to be safe and effective - has been given to more than 3 billion children. But there are some extremely rare side effects: Scientists estimate that for every 2.7 million first doses given, one child will be paralyzed by the live polio virus in the vaccine. In even rarer instances, the live virus can mutate into a form capable of starting new outbreaks among unimmunized people where vaccination rates are low. Worldwide, several hundred vaccine-derived cases have been reported annually since at least 2021, with at least 98 this year. Most public health experts agree the oral vaccine should be pulled as soon as possible. But they acknowledge there simply isn't enough injectable vaccine - which uses no live virus and doesn't come with the risks of the oral vaccine - to wipe out polio alone. The injectable vaccine also is more expensive and requires more training to administer. More than two dozen current and former senior polio officials told AP the agencies involved haven't been willing to even consider revising their strategy to account for some of the campaign's problems. Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who sits on an independent board reviewing polio eradication, said it would be impossible to eliminate polio without the oral vaccine. But he's urged authorities to find ways to adapt, such as adopting new methods to identify polio cases more quickly. Since 2011, he and colleagues have issued regular reports about overall program failures. "There's no management," he said, citing a lack of accountability. Last year, former WHO scientist Dr. T. Jacob John twice emailed WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calling for a "major course correction." John shared the emails with AP and said he's received no response. "WHO is persisting with polio control and creating polio with one hand and attempting to control it by the other," John wrote. In his response to AP, WHO polio director Ahmed said the oral vaccine is a "core pillar" of eradication strategy and that "almost every country that is polio-free today used (it) to achieve that milestone." "We need to step back and really care for the people," he said. "The only way we can do that in large parts of the world is with oral polio vaccine." Ahmed also pointed to the success WHO and partners had eliminating polio from India, once considered a nearly impossible task. In the four years before polio was wiped out there, health workers delivered about 1 billion doses of the oral vaccine to more than 170 million children. Today, nearly all of the world's polio cases -- mostly in Africa and the Middle East -- are mutated viruses from the oral vaccine, except for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scott Barrett, a Columbia University professor, called for an inquiry into how things went so wrong - particularly with a failed effort in 2016, when authorities removed a strain from the oral vaccine. They miscalculated, leading to outbreaks in more than 40 countries that paralyzed more than 3,000 children, according to an expert report commissioned by WHO. Last year, a mutated virus traced to that effort paralyzed a baby in Gaza. "Unless you have a public inquiry where all the evidence comes out and WHO makes serious changes, it will be very hard to trust them," he said. With an annual budget of about $1 billion, the polio initiative is among the most expensive in all of public health. This year, the U.S. withdrew from WHO, and President Donald Trump has cut foreign aid. WHO officials have privately admitted that sustaining funding would be difficult without success. Some say the money would be better spent on other health needs. "We have spent more than $1 billion (in external polio funding) in the last five years in Pakistan alone, and it didn't buy us any progress," said Roland Sutter, who formerly led polio research at WHO. "If this was a private company, we would demand results." Villagers, too, have protested the cost, staging hundreds of boycotts of immunization campaigns since 2023. Instead of polio vaccines, they ask for medicine, food and electricity. In Karachi, locals told AP they didn't understand the government's fixation on polio and complained of other issues - dirty water, heroin addiction. Workers are accompanied by armed guards; Pakistani authorities say more than 200 workers and police assigned to protect them have been killed since the 1990s, mostly by militants. The campaign also is up against a wave of misinformation, including that the vaccine is made from pig urine or will make children reach puberty early. Some blame an anti-vaccine sentiment growing in the U.S. and other countries that have largely funded eradication efforts and say it's reaching even remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In suburban southwest Pakistan, Saleem Khan, 58, said two grandchildren under 5 were vaccinated over his family's objections. "It results in disability," said Khan, without citing evidence for his belief. "They are vaccinated because officials reported our refusal to authorities and the police." Svea Closser, professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University, said Pakistan and Afghanistan were less resistant to immunization decades ago. Now, people are angry about the focus on polio and lack of help for diseases like measles or tuberculosis, she said, spurring conspiracy theories. "Polio eradication has created a monster," Closser said. It doesn't help, she added, that in this region, public trust in vaccine campaigns was undermined when the CIA organized a fake hepatitis drive in 2011 in an attempt to get DNA and confirm the presence of Osama bin Laden or his family. Workers see that continued mistrust every day. In a mountainous region of southeastern Afghanistan where most people survive by growing wheat and raising cows and chickens, a mother of five said she'd prefer that her children be vaccinated against polio, but her husband and other male relatives have instructed their families to reject it. They believe the false rumors that it will compromise their children's fertility. "If I allow it," the woman said, declining to be named over fears of family retribution, "I will be beaten and thrown out." (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
News18
6 hours ago
- News18
WHO calls for research scale-up towards ending TB in South-East Asia region
New Delhi, Aug 5 (PTI) The WHO on Tuesday called for urgent scale-up of research, innovation and collaboration to accelerate momentum towards ending tuberculosis in the South-East Asia region, which continues to bear nearly half of the global TB burden, accounting for the highest share of cases and deaths worldwide. Experts, national TB programme managers and researchers along with partners and members of civil society began a three-day virtual workshop organised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for advancing research and innovation to accelerate momentum towards ending TB in the WHO South-East Asia region. 'In our Region alone, nearly 5 million people developed TB and close to 600,000 died from the disease in 2023," said Dr Catharina Boehme, Officer-in-Charge, WHO South-East Asia Region. Calling for urgent action, she said that achieving the ambitious targets in the WHO End TB Strategy requires collaboration to accelerate research and innovation. It requires the adoption and use of new tools, technologies and drugs. Ensuring timely and equitable access to these innovations remains critical to achieving impacts at scale, leaving no one behind, Boehme said. While the region recorded a significant increase in TB case notifications in 2023, signalling recovery after COVID-19-related setbacks, progress remains insufficient to meet the End TB Strategy targets aligned with the sustainable development goals that call for a 90 per cent reduction in TB deaths and an 80 per cent reduction in incidence by 2030 compared to 2015 levels. Post-COVID-19 pandemic, TB once again reemerged as the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, the WHO said in a statement. It places a disproportionate burden on the poorest and most vulnerable, further exacerbating inequalities. In the South-East Asia region, 30 per cent to 80 per cent of the TB-affected households experience catastrophic costs, underscoring the need for equitable, people-centred approaches and strengthening social protection for the affected, the statement said. Despite these challenges, the WHO South-East Asia region made notable progress. In 2023, 3.8 million new and relapse TB cases were notified, with an 89 per cent treatment success rate for those who began treatment in 2022. Missed cases dropped to 22 per cent in 2023, down from 44 per cent in 2020, the statement said. Backed by strong political commitment, countries in the region are increasingly leveraging new approaches such as artificial intelligence for case detection, computer-aided diagnostics, digital adherence tools and direct benefit transfers for patients, streamlining the social support process. At the same time, several countries are undertaking important research, including epidemiological research to assess the disease burden, the statement said. Bangladesh recently completed a patient cost survey, while findings from India's RATIONS study on the impact of nutrition on TB outcomes and incidence of the disease have contributed to the global guidance. Social and community-based innovations are also playing a vital role. Nepal's TB-Free Pallika initiative and multisectoral coordination mechanisms in Myanmar are helping reach vulnerable populations with person-centred care. A review by the WHO South-East Asia found that member states published over 3,000 TB-related research articles in the past six years, with 60 per cent being original research. However, uptake of research outcomes remains uneven due to knowledge gaps and limited platforms for knowledge exchange and collaborative use, the statement said. 'Our progress is uneven. Research and innovation capacity is varied across the Region, and the results of these efforts are often siloed and unavailable for collaborative use. The rise in drug-resistant forms of TB remains very concerning," said Dr Boehme. The key areas of focus during the virtual consultation include strengthening of South-South collaboration, vaccine preparedness, digital tools for patient care and adherence and efforts to overcome vaccine hesitancy. Participants will also discuss aligning regulatory processes, promoting data sharing and improving platforms for knowledge exchange. A significant emphasis is being placed on identifying operational implementation research priorities, especially in relation to social determinants such as undernutrition and climate change, which influence TB incidence and outcomes. top videos View all 'Several ongoing innovations are attempting to reach out to marginalized and vulnerable groups through active case finding and providing affected families socio-economic support to mitigate catastrophic costs", said Dr Boehme. Highlighting the importance of equity, she added, 'It is incumbent to ensure equitable access to the benefits of research and innovation, including vaccines, medicines and diagnostics." PTI PLB KSS KSS (This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI) view comments First Published: August 05, 2025, 19:30 IST News agency-feeds WHO calls for research scale-up towards ending TB in South-East Asia region Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. 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