New Polio Case in Gilgit-Baltistan — Parents Must Vaccinate Their Children

Pakistan's National Emergency Operations Centre confirmed a wild poliovirus case in Gilgit-Baltistan, a region that had not featured in recent case records.

Why a case here is different

Gilgit-Baltistan is not a poliovirus reservoir. It is mountainous, sparsely populated and geographically distant from the southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Karachi and Quetta corridors where transmission persists. A confirmed case there means one of two things, and genetic sequencing of the virus distinguishes between them.

Either the virus was carried into the region by someone travelling from an infected area — the more likely explanation, given the volume of internal movement for work, trade and tourism — or it had been circulating locally without detection, which would point to a gap in surveillance.

Both findings are serious, and both require the same immediate response.

The importation problem

This is the reason the programme insists that low-incidence areas cannot relax. Poliovirus travels with people. As long as transmission continues anywhere in Pakistan, every region remains at risk of importation — and regions without recent cases are exactly where population immunity is most likely to have drifted downward, because campaign urgency naturally fades where nobody has seen the disease.

A child in Gilgit-Baltistan who has never received polio drops is just as vulnerable as a child in Bannu. The only difference is how likely the virus is to reach them — and that is a matter of travel, not of geography.

Why the appeal to parents

The programme's message in low-incidence regions is harder to deliver than in outbreak areas, because the risk feels abstract. But the arithmetic is unchanged: polio paralysis is permanent, there is no treatment, and roughly one infection in two hundred causes it. The only protection is vaccination before exposure, not after.

Response

Emergency house-to-house vaccination across the affected area, investigation of the child's vaccination history and travel history, an active search for other paralysis cases, and expanded environmental sampling to determine whether the virus is circulating locally.

For parents in Gilgit-Baltistan and other low-incidence areas

Do not treat a region's clean record as protection. Two drops for every child under five in every campaign round, and complete the routine immunisation schedule — which is what provides lasting individual protection. If a team does not reach your household, call 1166.

Related: cases by province · surveillance · polio FAQs