Pakistan detected one more polio case in the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, raising the country's tally of the infectious disease to 50 cases this year, officials said Wednesday.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where the spread of polio has never been stopped.
The sudden rise in cases of polio, which is an infection caused by a virus that mostly affects children under 5, has hampered the country's yearslong efforts to make it a polio-free state.
The latest case was detected in Tank, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where militants often target polio workers and police assigned for anti-polio campaigns, according to a statement by the National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication. Pakistan has reported 50 such cases this year, it said.
Most polio cases this year were reported in the restive southwestern Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces bordering Afghanistan, where 23 confirmed cases have surfaced, according to data from the World Health Organization. That's up from six cases in 2023.
