Two policemen guarding polio vaccinators in North-West Pakistan were shot dead by unidentified gunmen on Tuesday, 16 August. The incident occurred in Tank district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bordering South Waziristan. The gunmen escaped after the incident, and police are busy combing the area to identify and arrest the culprits.
The two assailants, who came on a motorcycle, were hiding near a small water channel before opening fire on the guards from a very close range, the local police informed.
The team of two polio vaccinators emerged unharmed from the attack but this is yet another setback to the polio vaccination drive in the country. Pakistan remains one of the two countries in the world where polio is still classified as an endemic, neighbouring Afghanistan being the other one.
Polio vaccinators in Pakistan have to be accompanied by police officials owing to a threat to their lives from various terrorist groups headquartered in Pakistan. These terrorist groups have spread all kinds of rumours about the polio vaccines, from pig fat and alcohol content in vaccines to these vaccines causing sterilization.
Another reason why all the terrorist organisations based out of Pakistan look at vaccinators suspiciously is that the US intelligence agency CIA staged a fake vaccination campaign to get a confirmation of Osama bin Laden’s residence in Pakistan. These terror groups and their leaders don’t want to be the next ones to fall prey to a US strike.
Many polio workers and their security guards have been killed in Pakistan over the years by terrorists, making it difficult for the world to get rid of the disease. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where the disease still remains endemic.
With total eradication not achievable due to the resistance shown against the vaccine in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the disease has started reappearing in previously polio-free countries like the US and UK. The United States registered its first case of polio in almost a decade in July this year. While the UK detected the polio virus in sewage samples in June this year, leading to the urgent vaccination of about a million children in the area. Both US and UK get plenty of immigrants from Pakistan.