Surgan:
Health workers are braiding freezing temperatures this week to administer Polio vaccinations to Azad Jammu and cashmere after the cases jumped nationally last year.
Neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where polio is endemic, and activists have targeted targeted vaccination teams and their safety escorts.
A police officer keeping polio vaccinators in the northwest was killed by activists on Monday, the first day of the annual campaign which is expected to last a week.
In cashmere, health worker Manzoor Ahmad has traveled snowy mountains while temperatures fell to less than six degrees Celsius (21 degrees fahrenheit) to administer polio vaccinations in the region.
“It is a mountainous and hard zone … We arrive here for the vaccination against polio despite the three snow feet,” Ahmad told AFP, who heads the Polio campaign to cashmere administered by Pakistan .
Social worker Mehnaz, who has a name and has helped vaccinators since 2018 said that the difficult climate posed a huge risk for vaccination teams.
“We have no monthly salary … We come here to give polio to children despite the glaciers and avalanches,” she told AFP.
“We risk our lives and leave our children at home.”
The challenge is more important this year for the country with a population of 240 million inhabitants, after having recorded at least 73 cases of polio in 2024 – a strong increase compared to only six cases the previous year.
Health workers aim to vaccinate around 1,700 children in a week in the city of Surgan, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Kashmir administered by Pakistan. “Our goal is to give polio fire to 750,000 children under the age of five,” said Ahmad.
