Killing of Mother-Daughter Team Shakes Polio Eradication Drive in Pakistan

Two polio vaccinators — a mother-daughter team — were shot dead in Pakistan Thursday, the first time in two years that the polio eradication drive has been shaken by assassinations.

While tragic, the killings in Baluchistan province will not seriously disrupt Pakistan’s eradication drive, said one of its leaders.

“We are very close to winning the battle,” said Aziz Memon, a textile executive who heads Rotary International’s local polio vaccination efforts.

Last year, Pakistan had only eight confirmed cases of polio paralysis; four years ago, the nation had 306.

The only other country with ongoing transmission of polio is Afghanistan, which had 14 cases last year, most of them in provinces adjoining Pakistan and among Pashtuns, the predominant ethnic group in border areas.

The two countries now coordinate their national vaccination days, in which more than 200,000 part-time canvassers in Pakistan and 40,000 in Afghanistan try to give vaccine drops to every child under age 5.

Two years ago, the blast of a suicide bomber near a polio center in Quetta, the province’s main city, killed a local official and 13 police officers assigned to guard vaccination teams. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.

The Taliban in Afghanistan has never opposed polio vaccine; hostility to it by some factions of the fragmented Pakistani Taliban has largely faded in the last two years, Memon said.

But there is persistent hostility between Pakistan’s military and clan militias in some mountainous border areas that have never been fully under government control.

The vaccinators, a 38-year-old woman and her 16-year-old daughter, were each shot in the head by motorcycle-riding assassins, Pakistani authorities said. Memon said he would go to Quetta to console and compensate the widower, a truck driver with six other children. In the past, Rotary has given the families of murdered vaccinators thousands of dollars.

The other disease closest to complete eradication is dracunculiasis, better known as Guinea worm disease. In 2017, there were only 30 cases in the world, 15 in Chad and 15 in Ethiopia, according to the Carter Center in Atlanta, which leads the fight against it.