By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has recorded its fifth polio case of 2026, after the virus was confirmed in a 17-month-old girl in the north-western district of Bannu.
The child comes from the Khandar Khankhel union council in Domel tehsil, an official at the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) said on Tuesday. Four of this year’s five cases have been found in the wider Bannu division, and three of those were in Bannu district itself.
The case was confirmed on the website of Pakistan’s polio eradication programme. It said vaccination had cut cases by 99.8 percent, from an estimated 20,000 a year in the early 1990s to five so far this year, but that transmission remained persistent in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).
“This new case underscores the urgent need to maintain strong surveillance and vaccination efforts nationwide, because no child will be safe from polio until every child is vaccinated and safe,” the statement said.
Four of this year’s cases have been detected in KP and one in Sindh. That is well below the 31 recorded in 2025 and the 74 in 2024. Last year KP accounted for 20 of the 31 cases, Sindh for nine, and Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan for one each.
Officials expect a marked fall in the 2026 total compared with the past two years. They credit better performance in vaccination campaigns, and the onset of winter, when the virus is said to become largely dormant in the cold.
“The ongoing calendar year has proved to be much better in terms of performance,” Anwarul Haq, head of the Pakistan Polio Programme said after the latest campaign ended. He said fewer cases were likely now that the country had entered the low-transmission season.
The week-long sub-national campaign ended on 27 September, and more than 28.2 million children were vaccinated. It ran across 112 selected districts.
Programme data showed that most environmental samples collected in the first two months of 2026 tested negative for poliovirus. Positive samples were more than three times fewer than in the same period of 2025. The World Health Organization (WHO) has since counted 118 positive environmental samples in Pakistan this year, based on its bulletin for the week ending 16 August. The comparable figure for the whole of 2025 was 651.
Security remains the main threat to progress in the north-west, and Bannu is the most acute weakness.
“There are severe security-related issues in Bannu where not only polio campaigns are stopped, but at times polio team workers are also kidnapped,” a polio expert said. The expert called for those problems to be addressed, describing Bannu as the only place from which the virus “can bounce back”.
The programme has also warned that current tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan could give the virus an opening to rebound in the coming high-transmission season.
The two countries are the last in the world where wild poliovirus remains endemic, and the virus moves freely across their border. Afghanistan has recorded 32 cases this year, according to the latest WHO figures, and its authorities have blamed the rise largely on the mass return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. Kabul’s health ministry began a four-day nationwide vaccination drive this week, aimed at more than 12.7 million children under five.
Polio is a highly contagious and incurable disease that can cause lifelong paralysis and, in some cases, death. It can be prevented with safe and effective vaccines.
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