PAKISTAN | United Nations decides to reduce the campaign Killed three other workers polio campaign in Pakistan

Three new murders have risen today to nine the number of workers in the vaccination campaign against polio killed in Pakistan in the past 48 hours in what is suspected to be a wave of crimes coordinated by the Taliban insurgency. On the death of a vaccinator on Monday and five women, one of them 14-year- joins the murder this morning of another member of the medical team who was shot dead in Peshawar, capital of the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KPK) and a vaccinator and his driver in the Charsadda district, reports the BBC, adding that the UN has decided to reduce its campaign in the country. All attacks have been perpetrated by masked gunmen firing from motorcycles and then abscond. Although the wave of deaths yesterday led the federal government to order the suspension of the campaign, the regional government of KPK disregarded the instruction and decided to continue today with three days of vaccination despite security threats. "We have continued because the most important is to end polio,"said an official of the regional Ministry of Health, Ali Shah, while a police official in Peshawar said that "it is giving protection to vaccination teams."

Suspicions

Although there has been no formal claim the wave of attacks, suspicion falls on the Taliban (Pakistan grouped under the acronym TTP) as it related groups in the tribal areas in summer threatened to attack the vaccinators. What at first was a boycott of local tribal groups to demand economic improvements to the local administration quickly became a campaign against vaccination arguments made fortunes locals. One of the first justifications that gave the Taliban threats to vaccinators is that they were spies for the U.S. , as it was a Pakistani doctor who participated in the work location of Osama bin Laden last year. Dr. Shakil Afridi, sentenced to 33 years in prison, helped set up a fake child vaccination campaign against hepatitis in the area where bin Laden was believed to obtain DNA samples from the blood of immunized. The hepatitis vaccine is injected while the polio is administered in drop form. A more recent argument is that the Taliban's campaign against polio vaccination is part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. Despite all the propaganda that had led to direct threats and even murder last July of an individual vaccination teams in Karachi, until this week there had been a coordinated wave of attacks.

Latest attacks

The attacks in the past 48 hours have occurred in the province of KPK, Pashtun majority, and in the southern city of Karachi, with a large presence of people of this ethnic and growing focus of activity of TTP. Polio is a contagious viral disease that can affect the central nervous system and cause paralysis, this is a disease that has no cure but its prevention by an oral vaccine is easy. Pakistan is the only country with Afghanistan and Nigeria where polio is still endemic and local authorities together with international agencies made a major effort to immunize all children under five in the country. According to the agency, which coordinates the fight against this disease, each year there are four national campaigns for several days in receiving the vaccine about 34 million children. Official figures show that last year there were 198 cases in Pakistan, while in 2012 already accounted 56.