ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has reduced polio cases by 99.8% since launching its eradication campaign in 1994, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, with annual infections falling from about 20,000 to 31 last year.
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that mainly affects children under five and can cause irreversible paralysis. Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries in the world where the disease is still endemic, despite decades of global eradication efforts.
Pakistan has reported three polio cases so far this year.
“Pakistan has reduced polio cases by 99.8% — from 20,000 cases a year in 1994 to just 31 in 2025,” WHO Pakistan said in a post on X.
“This is what science, commitment, and collective action can achieve.”
According to health authorities, 74 cases were reported in 2024.
Pakistan launched its national polio eradication program in 1994 and has since carried out repeated nationwide vaccination campaigns aimed at reaching millions of children.
But eradication efforts have faced persistent challenges, including vaccine misinformation and resistance from some hard-line religious groups, who falsely claim the immunization campaign is a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children or conduct espionage.
Militant groups have also repeatedly targeted polio workers and security personnel assigned to protect vaccination teams, particularly in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. More than 200 polio workers and police officers assigned to protect polio teams have been killed in Pakistan since the 1990s, according to health and security officials.
