According to the UN, the Taliban have suspended polio vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The Taliban have suspended polio vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan, the United Nations said Monday, a devastating setback for polio eradication efforts because the virus is among the most contagious in the world and any unvaccinated group of children in areas where the virus is spreading could reverse years of progress.

Afghanistan is one of two countries where the spread of potentially fatal, debilitating disease was never stopped. The other is PakistanThe Taliban’s decision is likely to have significant implications for other countries in the region and beyond.

News of the suspension was relayed to UN agencies shortly before the vaccination campaign was scheduled to start in September. No reason was given for the suspension and no one from the Taliban-controlled government was immediately available for comment.

A senior World Health Organization official said they were aware of discussions about moving away from door-to-door vaccinations and instead administering vaccinations in places such as mosques.

The WHO has confirmed 18 cases of polio in Afghanistan this year, all but two in the south of the country. That’s six more cases than expected in 2023.

“The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is aware of recent policy discussions about shifting from house-to-house polio vaccination campaigns to on-the-ground vaccination campaigns in parts of Afghanistan,” said Dr. Hamid Jafari of WHO. “Partners are currently discussing and trying to understand the scope and impact of any changes to current policy.”

Polio campaigns in neighboring Pakistan are regularly overshadowed by violence. Militants Target vaccination teams and the police deployed to protect them, falsely claiming that the campaigns are part of a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.

Only in August, the WHO reported that Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to implement an “intensive and coordinated campaign” focused on improving vaccination coverage in endemic areas and responding effectively and timely to evidence elsewhere.

During a nationwide campaign in June 2024, Afghanistan used a house-to-house vaccination strategy for the first time in five years, a tactic that helped reach the majority of children targeted, the WHO said.

But in the southern province of Kandahar, the base of top Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, vaccination campaigns have been carried out from place to place or mosque to mosque, but they are less effective than vaccinating people at home.

There are still many vulnerable children in Kandahar because door-to-door vaccinations are not being carried out there, the WHO said. “In Afghanistan, the overall number of women in vaccination campaigns remains around 20 percent, which means that in some areas not all children receive adequate coverage,” it said.

Any setback in Afghanistan poses a risk to the programme in Pakistan due to high population movement, the WHO warned last month.

Pakistani health official Anwarul Haq said the poliovirus would spread over time and continue to affect children in both countries unless vaccination campaigns were carried out regularly and simultaneously.

“Afghanistan is the only neighboring country from which many Afghans come to Pakistan and go back,” says Haq, coordinator of the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio Eradication. “People from other neighboring countries like India and Iran do not come to Pakistan in large numbers.”

A concerted effort is needed to eradicate the disease, he told the Associated Press.

The suspension of the campaign is the latest obstacle in what has become a troubled global effort to stop polio. The initiative, which costs about $1 billion each year, has missed several deadlines to eradicate the disease, and technical errors in the vaccination strategy established by WHO and its partners have had costly consequences.

In addition, the oral vaccine has inadvertently triggered outbreaks in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and is now responsible for the majority of polio cases worldwide.

This was recently shown in Gazawhere a baby partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of polio first detected in the oral vaccine; this is the first case in the region in more than 25 years.

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Associated Press writers Maria Cheng in London and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.