BAJAUR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health officials on Thursday said that two new cases of polio have surfaced in the Bajaur district of the province.
According to the health department officials, “A five-year-old girl from Kut Kot and a seven-year-old boy fell victim to the virus.”
It was further reported that both the children had been administered the polio vaccine seven times.
The latest cases in Bajaur take the number of polio cases in the region to three for this year, and eight in Pakistan overall.
Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a crippling childhood disease, affecting mostly children under the age of five caused by the poliovirus has no cure and can only be prevented by giving a child multiple vaccine doses.
According to the WHO, the number of polio cases worldwide has fallen by more than 99 per cent since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases than to 22 reported cases in 2017.
Pakistan is one of the only three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, that suffers from polio and has been battling polio for the past several years.
The number of cases declined from 306 in 2014 to 54 in 2015, 20 in 2016 and eight in 2017.
In 2018, six polio cases have been reported so far.
According to the World Health Organisation, a country must have no cases for three consecutive years in order to be considered to have eradicated polio.