Pakistan to run week-long polio drive in 97 districts from November 2

The National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) has announced a week-long sub-national anti-polio vaccination campaign from November 2 to 8, 2026. It will cover 97 high-risk districts and aims to reach more than 23.9 million children under the age of five.

Frontline workers will go door to door and give two drops of oral polio vaccine to every eligible child. The NEOC describes the drive as part of Pakistan's final push to eradicate wild poliovirus.

According to the campaign plan shared by the NEOC, Punjab has 13 districts with 9.278 million children, Sindh 20 districts including all of Karachi with 6.883 million, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 27 districts with 4.808 million, and Balochistan 31 districts with 2.217 million. Islamabad has 447,000 children, Gilgit-Baltistan 3 districts with 153,000, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir 2 districts with 183,000.

The announcement follows a new polio case in Karachi East, which raised the national count for 2026 to seven. Five cases have come from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and two from Sindh. The latest case is a six-month-old child, and the last case in Karachi was in December 2024. Officials said environmental surveillance still detects the virus in sewage samples, pointing to silent transmission.

Anwarul Haq, head of the Pakistan Polio Programme, said the current year has been much better in terms of performance. He said that with the low-transmission season under way, there are fewer chances of polio cases. Winter is considered the best window to interrupt transmission because the virus becomes largely dormant in cold temperatures.

A senior NEOC official said Pakistan has cut annual cases by 99.8 percent, from an estimated 20,000 in the early 1990s to 31 in 2025. The official added that even seven cases mean seven children paralysed for life. The September campaign deployed more than 273,000 frontline workers, 60 percent of them women, and vaccinated 28.2 million children in 112 districts.

Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries with wild poliovirus transmission, and together they have reported 48 WPV1 cases in 2026. Pakistan had 74 cases in 2024 and 31 in 2025, 20 of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Affected districts fell from 67 in early 2025 to 23 in early 2026. Officials said security problems in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Bannu, the origin of three of this year's cases, remain the biggest threat. In some parts of Bannu campaigns have stopped and workers have faced kidnapping threats. The NEOC urged parents, religious leaders, communities and media to cooperate and counter vaccine misinformation.