A door-to-door polio vaccination campaign will be launched in Afghanistan next month, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund have said. In a statement issued on Monday, they said the Taliban government had agreed to support the campaign.
“WHO and UNICEF welcome the decision by the Taliban leadership supporting the resumption of house-to-house polio vaccination across Afghanistan,” the statement said.
The statement pointed out that only one case of wild poliovirus had been reported in Afghanistan since the start of the year, providing “an extraordinary opportunity to eradicate polio.”
The campaign will start on November 8 and will be the first in more than three years aimed at all children in Afghanistan, including more than three million in remote and previously inaccessible areas.
“This decision will allow us to make a giant stride in the efforts to eradicate polio,” Hervé Ludovic De Lys, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
“To eliminate polio completely, every child in every household across Afghanistan must be vaccinated, and with our partners, this is what we are setting out to do,” he said.
A second campaign in coordination with Pakistan will be launched in December.
Since the Taliban came to power two months ago, the UN had been talking with the group’s leadership to address the health challenges in the country, the statement said.
“The Taliban leadership has expressed their commitment for the inclusion of female frontline workers,” it said.
Afghanistan’s new rulers had also committed to “providing security and assuring the safety of all health workers across the country, which is an essential prerequisite for the implementation of polio vaccination campaigns,” the agencies said.
This is a departure from the Taliban’s previous position regarding the polio vaccination drives. Earlier, they suspected that these campaigns were being used to spy on their activities. Taliban leaders often told communities in areas they controlled that vaccines were a Western conspiracy aimed at sterilising Muslim children.