The team was robbed by unknown gunmen who shot aerial shots. They snatched the team’s mobiles, vaccines and 25000 rupees in cash.
The team was part of Sindh’s three-day long anti-polio efforts in which around 9 million children were to be vaccinated. The three-day campaign would be followed by a two day catch up in order to vaccinate children who were missed in the first three days.
Pakistan right now has had 111 cases of polio reported in the past year, of which 17 are in Sindh. The province has the second highest number of cases of polio after Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (which has 79 cases). Six of these cases are in Karachi thus making it the city with the largest number of cases in the province.
In 2018, according to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), Pakistan only had 12 cases of polio. This year there has been a sharp increase in the number of polio cases in the country.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world to have reported polio cases as the World Health Organization (WHO) claims that the disease has been eliminated all over the world.