No one understands the lifelong pain of polio better than Sajjad Ahmad, a father whose dreams for his daughter were shattered by a disease that is now close to eradication in Pakistan.
“My doll, Khushboo Bobi, was only three years old,” Sajjad recalled, his voice trembling. “She returned home from school with a high fever and constant sweating. By evening, she couldn’t stand.”
Rushing her to a nearby government hospital at tehsil Pabbi Nowshera district, Sajjad received heartbreaking news that changed his family forever after Khushboo had contracted polio who is now fifth class student at Govt Primary School Dheri Ishaq.
“It was heartbreaking for entire family,” he said. My doll was disabled for life. She has never run again.”
Today, Khushboo is 10 years old. While her condition cannot be reversed, Sajjad says her suffering became a turning point for his family.
“After this tragedy, I made sure all my remaining children were vaccinated. Thanks to the government’s polio eradication programme, all of them are healthy.”
“Polio is a highly contagious virus that attacks the nervous system, especially in malnourished children under five,” explained Dr. Malik Riaz, head of the children’s department at Government Hospital Pabbi Nowshera.
He said polio spreads through the fecal-oral route quickly and can lead to permanent paralysis or even death.
Emphasizing that the anti-polio vaccine is a safe and effective tool, he said it prevents 2 to 3 million deaths globally each year. “Improved vaccine coverage can save an additional two million children.”
He said stories like Khushboo’s underline why Pakistan’s intensified fight against polio is showing promising results.
Through coordinated national efforts, polio cases in the country have dropped by nearly 60 percent, declining from 74 cases in 2024 to 30 in 2025.
“In the outgoing year, large-scale nationwide polio immunization campaigns were conducted, targeting more than 45 million children across the country,” said Zia ur Rehman, Spokesman for the Polio Eradication Programme.
He told APP that 98 percent of children under five in the target population received polio drops during these campaigns, significantly strengthening community immunity.
Each campaign mobilized over 400,000 frontline workers, including 25,000 female vaccinators, who went door to door to reach children in the most remote and underserved areas.
As a result of these strenuous efforts, environmental surveillance has also shown marked improvement.
“Polio virus detection in environmental samples has drastically reduced and is now confined to only a few pockets in southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Karachi,” Zia said.
He added that no new polio cases have been reported from densely populated urban centers such as Karachi, Quetta, and Peshawar, once considered core reservoirs of the virus. “The number of districts affected by polio in the country has declined from 82 in 2024 to 36 in 2025,” Zia added.
He said the focus of health teams is to educate parents to ensure vaccination of their children in each campaign for boosting immunity of the minors.
Zia said that even if a child is already immunized, receiving polio drops during any nationwide campaign further boosts his immunity and enhances protection against infection.
He said coordination between different Health departments including Federal Directorate of Immunization (FDI), Expanded Programme for Immunization (EPI), National Emergency Operation Center, Education Department and others are making the polio eradication efforts more effective and impactful.
In the recently conducted Measles and Rubella immunization campaign targeting 35,167,257 number of children from 0 to 59 months, around 23,186,915 number of children were also administered Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV).
Apart from strong coordination at the national level, international synchronization has also been achieved by simultaneously launching polio immunization campaigns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the only two countries in the world where polio cases are still reported.
Polio Eradication Programme Spokesman informed that the upcoming polio eradication campaign starting from December 15, 2025 is fully synchronized with Afghanistan where vaccination will also be carried out nationwide.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Khaliq-ur-Rehman, while talking with newsmen at the launching of polio immunization campaign recently in KP said that efforts have been made to reach target children in Southern districts where security issues hamper complete coverage.
Additional Security arrangements have been made in districts where security concerns are high and hopefully all the children will be administered polio preventive vaccine, he added.