Pakistan reports second polio case of 2025 from southern Sindh province

KARACHI: Pakistani health authorities this week confirmed the country’s second polio case of 2025 in the country’s southern Sindh province, days after concluding a national immunization campaign against the infection. 
Polio is a paralyzing disease with no cure and to ensure immunity, health experts say it is crucial that all children under five complete the oral polio vaccine series. The South Asian country last year reported 74 polio cases in 2024, a sharp increase from just six in 2023.
The second polio case of the year was reported from district Badin in Sindh, Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Program said in a statement on Wednesday. The first case of the infection was reported in the Dera Ismail Khan district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province last month. 
“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health has confirmed the detection of the second wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) case of 2025,” Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Program said. 
Of Pakistan’s 74 polio cases reported last year, 27 were from Balochistan, 22 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 23 from Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.
The Pakistan polio program runs several mass vaccination drives annually. This year’s first anti-polio drive was conducted from Feb. 3 to 9 during which over 45 million children were vaccinated. 
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last two countries where polio remains endemic. In the early 1990s, Pakistan reported around 20,000 cases annually but in 2018 the number dropped to eight cases.
Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994, but efforts to eradicate the virus have been hampered by vaccine misinformation, opposition from some religious hard-liners who view immunization as a foreign plot, and frequent attacks on polio vaccination teams by militant groups.