Islamabad, June 21 (IANS) Pakistan confirmed its 12th case of wild poliovirus this year, after the virus was detected in a child from the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the Ministry of National Health Services said.

The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad confirmed the virus in stool samples collected from a 33-month-old boy residing in Union Council Shamsikhel of Bannu district, the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

This marks the sixth polio case reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2025. According to official data, Pakistan has so far recorded 12 polio cases this year — four from Sindh, one from Punjab, and one from Gilgit-Baltistan.

The Pakistan Polio Eradication Program has conducted three nationwide immunisation campaigns this year, in February, April, and May, reaching over 45 million children under the age of 5, the ministry said.

Health authorities urged parents and caregivers to ensure that all children receive multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine, an effective protection against the incurable and potentially paralysing disease, Xinhua news agency reported.

Pakistan reported a total of 74 polio cases in 2024, official figures show.

According to the World Health Organization, Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that largely affects children under 5 years of age. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (e.g. contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.

In 1988, the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution for the worldwide eradication of polio, marking the launch of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, spearheaded by national governments, WHO, Rotary International, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), UNICEF, and later joined by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

Wild poliovirus cases have decreased by over 99 per cent since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases in more than 125 endemic countries to 6 reported cases in 2021. Of the 3 strains of wild poliovirus (type 1, type 2 and type 3), wild poliovirus type 2 was eradicated in 1999, and wild poliovirus type 3 was eradicated in 2020. As of 2022, endemic wild poliovirus type 1 remains in two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.

–IANS

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