A health worker and two policemen are killed in an attack on a polio vaccination team in Pakistan

June 28. (EUROPA PRESS) –

At least one health worker and two policemen were killed on Tuesday in an attack by unidentified gunmen on a polio vaccination team in Pakistan’s North Waziristan province, on the border with Afghanistan, authorities confirmed.

The event took place in the Data Jel area one day after the authorities launched a vaccination campaign for 12.6 million children in the area, according to the newspaper ‘The Daily Pakistan’. The event has also resulted in a child wounded by a bullet.

The spokesman for the national polio program, Zulfikar Babajel, has detailed in statements given to the German news agency DPA that during the last two months ten cases of polio have been detected in Waziristan after more than a year without infections being detected.

Polio, a highly contagious disease that primarily affects children, is transmitted primarily by the fecal-oral route, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The virus is endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, after Nigeria declared its eradication in 2020.