The World Health Organization on Tuesday withdrew polio-vaccination teams from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar after two volunteers were shot, in another setback to eradicating the crippling disease that remains resilient in the region.
A 19-year-old female vaccinator was killed and a 20-year-old one was critically injured in Tuesday's attack in Peshawar's Shaikh Mohammadi area, a WHO official said. While there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the Pakistani Taliban have repeatedly targeted polio workers in the past. Last week, a policeman escorting a polio-vaccination team was gunned down in the country's troubled northwest.
Several conservative clerics in Pakistan have condemned the polio-eradication campaign as a Western conspiracy to sterilize or poison Muslim children. This hostility gained fresh currency after the 2011 raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden: Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, was imprisoned after it emerged he had established a vaccination program at the Central Intelligence Agency's behest to track down bin Laden's compound.
While Dr. Afridi's cover was a hepatitis-vaccination program, "Zero Dark Thirty," a Hollywood dramatization of the raid, appeared to depict polio workers collecting intelligence for the CIA.
The WHO on Tuesday said it pulled back its monitoring staff from Peshawar, capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and would resume the vaccination program when the provincial government deemed it safe to continue.
"We have contacted the religious leaders and urged them to come forward to protect health workers," a WHO official said.
Mazhar Nisar, a spokesman for the polio-monitoring cell at the Pakistani prime minister's secretariat in Islamabad, said the program wouldn't be suspended countrywide.
Tuesday's attack in Pakistan came amid the start of a new regional immunization campaign. Elias Durry, the WHO polio team leader in Islamabad, said the previous national immunization campaign took place over three days in mid-April. More than 33 million children were vaccinated then, including 4.1 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he said, and no attacks were reported during that campaign.
"We have not given up on the children of Pakistan," Dr. Durry said. "We have to look for a way to overcome the problems and convince the religious leaders that this is in their best interest."
While polio has been eliminated in much of the world, largely through mass immunization campaigns, the disease remains endemic in four countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan.
Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi said Islamic religious leaders in his country had been "too vague in their condemnation" of attacks on vaccination campaigners.
The extremists "are asserting their authority against the government" by attacking the vaccination campaign, he said. "They see it as an extension of the state arm."
Attitudes toward the polio vaccination differ sharply between the Pakistani Taliban, a movement with little chance of taking over the state, and the Afghan Taliban, who ruled their country in the past and see themselves as a government-in-waiting, ready to return to Kabul once the U.S.-led coalition departs next year.
For years, the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, has been issuing safe-conduct letters to WHO-sponsored polio-vaccination teams operating in insurgent areas.
In a statement issued this month, the Afghan Taliban once again endorsed the vaccination drive, saying the movement "supports and lends a hand to all those programs which works for the health care of the helpless people of our country."
However, the Afghan Taliban also warned that U.N.-affiliated organizations such as the WHO should "employ unbiased people" and not send foreigners to dispense the vaccines. "The campaign should be harmonized with the regional conditions, Islamic values and local cultural traditions," the statement said.
Agha Gul Dost, an official with Afghanistan's ministry of public health, said Afghan immunization programs faced extreme challenges, both from continuing violence and insecurity as well as from the country's forbidding terrain. Successful programs, he said, depended on winning the trust of the local community.
Despite general support for vaccination efforts in Afghanistan, U.N. agencies in Afghanistan remain on edge after Taliban insurgents on Friday attacked the compound of the International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-affiliated body, in Kabul. Richard Danziger, the IOM's chief of mission in Afghanistan, said on Sunday that the attackers deliberately targeted international staff.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
29 May, 2013
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