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Gunmen have killed three female Pakistani polio workers and their driver in the most deadly attack on health workers in two years.
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Teams in Pakistan working to immunise children against the disease are often targeted by Taliban militants, who say the campaign is a cover for western spies, or accuse workers of distributing vaccines designed to sterilise children.
The women were attacked on their way to meet a police escort on Wednesday, said police official Asad Raza in the south-western city of Quetta. “Two men on a motorcycle intercepted the van and shot the occupants using a handgun,” he said.
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Polio cases this year stand at a 15-year high of 265 in Pakistan. The disease, which can kill or paralyse a child within hours of infection, has been eradicated everywhere else except for Nigeria and Afghanistan.
One reason for the spike in Pakistan is a military campaign in North Waziristan, a rugged region on the Afghan border, that forced a large number of unvaccinated children to flee their homes and move around the country in June.
An international monitoring body also blamed Pakistan’s government in a report last month. Vaccinators rarely get paid their government stipends, while police protection teams often turn up late, if at all.
The complacency of Pakistan’s government was “disastrous”, the report said, warning that the country risked re-infecting the rest of the world. Pakistan has already exported the virus to Syria, China, Israel and Egypt.
