QUETTA: Pakistani health authorities on Monday concluded a week-long polio campaign in its southwestern Balochistan province, hit hardest by the disease, amid looming security threats to vaccinators and security forces guarding them. 

Pakistan kickstarted the polio drive on Dec. 30 to vaccinate 2.6 million children against the disease in Balochistan. Pakistan reported 68 polio cases last year out of which 27 were from Balochistan. The northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Sindh provinces each recorded 19 cases while the eastern Punjab province and Islamabad each reported one case.

Pakistan, along with neighboring Afghanistan, remains the last polio-endemic country in the world.

“We have achieved our set target in the last province-wide anti-polio campaign,” Dr. Aftab Kakar, the provincial team lead at the National Stop Transmission of Polio (NSTOP) program told Arab News. 

“We had set a target to vaccinate more than 2.6 million children but are gathering entry data from all districts but due to the suspension of mobile service in Quetta, some entries are pending.”

Polio is a paralyzing disease with no cure. To provide high immunity against the virus, multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five are essential.

“We are planning our next anti-polio drive in the first week of February 2025 with further training to the polio staff across Balochistan to make next drives more effective,” Kakar said. “We are very much optimistic that polio cases will decline this year because we have noticed a major decline since September and October 2024.”

Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994 but efforts to eradicate the virus have since been undermined by vaccine misinformation and opposition from some religious hard-liners, who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western spies. Militant groups also frequently attack and kill members of polio vaccine teams.

On Dec. 18, provincial health authorities postponed the nationwide anti-polio drive twice due to security reasons and a boycott by health staffers. The virus killed three children, including a minor girl, in Balochistan’s Quetta, Zhob and Killa Abdullah districts last year.

In the early 1990s, the country reported around 20,000 cases annually, but in 2018, the number dropped to eight cases. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.

ISLAMABAD: An Islamabad accountability court will announce the verdict in a case involving former prime minister Imran Khan and his third wife Bushra Khan, in which they are accused of receiving land worth millions of dollars as bribe from a real estate tycoon through the Al-Qadir Trust, on Jan. 13, his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said on Monday. 

The charitable trust was set up by Khan and his third wife Bushra Khan in 2018 when still in office. Pakistani authorities have accused Khan and Bushra of receiving the land, worth up to 7 billion rupees ($25 million), from a property developer charged in Britain with money laundering.

Authorities accused Khan of getting the land in exchange for a favor to the property developer by using 190 million pounds repatriated by Britain in the money laundering probe to pay fines levied by a court against the developer. Khan’s aides have previously said that the land was donated to the trust for charitable purposes. The real estate developer has also denied any wrongdoing.

This is the second time the announcement of the verdict has been deferred. It was supposed to be announced on Dec. 23 but was delayed to Jan. 6. 

“Decision on Alaqadir Trust case postponed till 13th January, communicated by judicial staff to the Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s legal team,” the PTI said in a message circulated among the media. 

Khan’s party said the delay “questions the legitimacy of the merits of the trial,” alleging that it was conducted based on “phony evidence” to keep Khan in prison. 

Pakistani news website Geo.tv reported that the decision was deferred as the judge, Nasir Javed Rana, was on leave. 

Khan, who has been in jail since August 2023 in a slew of cases, had also become a beneficiary of the restored amendments, his party said after the ruling, arguing that he could now move the courts for acquittal in at least two major corruption cases, namely the land bribe case and an investigation involving the illegal sale of state gifts while he was PM.

Since his ouster from office, the former prime minister has led a campaign of unprecedented defiance against the country’s powerful military, accusing them of colluding with his rivals to orchestrate his removal. 

The military has denied Khan’s allegations and insisted strongly it does not interfere in politics.