Pakistan Tells Global Watchdog Polio Eradication Is Within Reach, Insecurity in KP Remains Biggest Hurdle

Pakistan told the Independent Monitoring Board in Geneva that polio eradication is now within reach, pointing to a steep decline in cases over recent years even as officials acknowledged that insecurity in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remains the single biggest obstacle standing between the country and a polio-free status.

The scale of the progress so far

The numbers presented to the IMB tell a genuinely dramatic story of decline. Pakistan has cut polio cases by 99.8 percent since the early 1990s, when roughly 20,000 children were paralyzed by the virus annually. More recently, cases fell from 74 in 2024 to 31 in 2025, and so far in 2026 only three cases have been reported. Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries in the world where wild poliovirus is still endemic, meaning Pakistan's progress or lack of it carries global significance for the broader eradication effort, not just domestic public health.

Who made the case in Geneva

A Pakistani delegation led by Minister of State for Health Dr Malik Mukhtar Ahmad Bharath presented the country's progress during meetings held July 20 to 23. The Prime Minister's Focal Person for Polio Eradication, Ayesha Raza Farooq, was joined by chief secretaries from Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, along with National Emergency Operations Centre Coordinator Muhammad Anwarul Haq, a delegation lineup that signals the effort is being treated as a genuinely national, cross-provincial priority rather than a health ministry initiative running in isolation.

Where the virus is still hiding

Farooq offered a precise characterization of where the remaining challenge lies: "The poliovirus footprint is narrowing, but it is now concentrated in the most difficult geographies." That framing matters because it distinguishes Pakistan's current challenge from the broader, nationwide transmission problem of past decades, the virus is not spreading widely anymore, it is persisting stubbornly in a small number of specific, hard-to-reach areas.

The security problem behind the health problem

Insecurity in southern KP was named directly as the biggest hurdle remaining, and the practical consequence is straightforward but serious: vaccination teams are unable to safely reach thousands of children in these areas, meaning the health challenge left in Pakistan's polio fight has become, in practice, largely a security and access challenge rather than a vaccine-supply or public-awareness one. That distinction shapes what kind of intervention can actually move the needle, more vaccine doses or public health messaging won't help if teams can't physically reach the children who need them.

A whole-of-government framing

Officials described the eradication push as now being "a whole-of-government mission" led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif personally, language that reflects an effort to elevate polio eradication above a routine health ministry program and into a coordinated priority spanning security, provincial administration and health delivery simultaneously, precisely because the remaining obstacle is as much about access and security coordination as it is about medical logistics.

What "within reach" actually requires

Reporting eradication as "within reach" to an international monitoring body is a meaningful public commitment, one that will be measured against whether Pakistan can actually resolve access in the remaining insecure pockets of southern KP rather than simply continuing to reduce case counts everywhere else. With only three cases reported so far this year, the numerical progress is real, but the qualitative challenge, reaching children in areas security concerns have made inaccessible to vaccination teams, may prove harder to solve through incremental improvement alone.