Surgan:

Health workers Mother freeze temperatures this week to manage polio vaccinations in Azad Jammu and Kashmir after cases rose nationwide last year.

Pakistan and the nearby Afghanistan are the only countries where polio is endemic and militants have for decades targeted vaccination team and their security shirts.

A police officer who guarded polio vaccinators in the northwestern was shot by militant Monday, the first day of the annual campaign to last a week.

In Kashmir, health worker Manzoor Ahmad pulled up snow -covered mountains as temperatures dipped to minus six degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) to manage polio vaccinations in the region.

“It’s a mountainous, hard area … We arrive here for polio vaccination despite the three feet of snowfall,” Ahmad, leading the polio campaign in Pakistan-managed Kashmir, told AFP.

Social worker Mehnaz, who goes with a name and has helped the vaccinators since 2018, said the difficult climate poses a huge risk to the vaccination teams.

“We have no monthly salary … We come here to give polio shots to the children despite glaciers and avalanches,” she told AFP.

“We risk our lives and leave our children at home.”

The challenge is greater this year for the country with a population of 240 million, after the registered at least 73 polio cases in 2024 – a sharp increase from only six cases the year before.

Health workers aim to vaccinate about 1,700 children within a week of the city of Surgan, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-managed Kashmir. “Our goal is to give polio shots to 750,000 children under five,” Ahmad said.