Mardan, Pakistan: Shower light early morning, Sidra Hussain grasped the cooler stacked with a sparkling polio vaccine bottle in northwest Pakistan.
Observing Hussain and his partner, a police officer released his rifle and horizon eyes.
In the concert they started their job – go to the door-to-door on the outskirts of Mardan, dripping bitter doses of roses into the baby’s mouth on the main milestone night for an anti-polio drive.
The last infection of the wild polyovirus was recorded on January 27, 2021, according to officials, and Friday marked the first time in the history of Pakistan that one year had passed without a new case.
To officially eradicate disease, a nation must be free of polio for three consecutive years – but even 12 months is a long time in the country where the vaccination team is in the target of a boiling rebellion.
Since the Taliban took over from neighboring Afghanistan, the version of the Pakistani movement has become brave and his fighters often target polio teams.
“Life or death is in God’s hands,” Hussain told AFP this week, in the middle of a high-walled compound filling in Khyber Province Pakhtunkhwa.
“We must come,” he said challenging.
“We can’t go back because it’s difficult.” Nigeria was officially eradicated by wild polio by 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only country in which diseases – which caused paralysis paralysis – still endemic.
Spread through feces and saliva, the virus has historically developed at the blurred border between South Asian countries, where the infrastructure of weak state and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has carved a house.
Sharing heritage with a separate group with the Taliban Afghanistan, TTP was founded in 2007 and once swayed above the big plot of the Pakistani turbulent tract.
In 2014 mostly overthrown by military attacks, the fighters retreated across the porous border with Afghanistan.
But last year the whole militant attacks jumped 56 percent according to Pakistani conflict and security studies, reversing a six-year-down trend.
The biggest number of attacks came in August, coinciding with the takeover of the Taliban Kabul.
Pakistani newspapers are regularly seasoned with police stories killed when they guard the polio team – and only this week a shot was shot down in Kohat – 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Mardan.
Pakistan media has reported as many as 70 polio workers who were killed in militant attacks since 2012 – mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
However, the TTP spokesman told AFP “never attacked any polio workers”, and that security forces were their target.
“They will be targeted wherever they do their duties,” he said, Deputy Commissioner Mardan Habib Ullah Afif acknowledged the polio team was a “very soft target”, but said the struggle to eradicate security threats.
“There is only one concept: we will defeat polio, we will defeat the militancy,” he promised.
Pakistani anti-polio drives have been running since 1994, with up to 260,000 regional wave staging vaccines regional campaigns in regional inoculation.
But on the outskirts of the country, the team often faces skepticism.
“In certain areas of Pakistan, it is considered a Western conspiracy,” explained Shahzad Baig – Head of the National Polio Eradication Program.
Theories range of wildly: The polio team is a spy, vaccine causes infertility, or contains pig fat which is prohibited by Islam.
Spy theory gets a currency with the murder of Osama bin Laden in 2011, whose hiding in Abbottabad was revealed to the United States – unwittingly – by the vaccine program run by Pakistan doctors.
“This is a complex situation,” said Baig.
“It’s socio-economical, it’s political.” The border porous with Afghanistan – strategic crutches for TTP – can also keep poly circulating.
“For viruses, Pakistan and Afghanistan are one country,” Baig said.
In Mardan, 10 teams – each consisting of two women and armed police guards – fans to the outskirts of the city when the morning turned to the afternoon.
The limestone team dates in the houses they visit and stains children’s fingers with insidestinal ink to mark those who have been inoculated.
On Monday they submitted dozens of more doses to add national calculations.
“We have fear in mind, but we have to be active to serve our nation,” said Polio Zeb-Un-Nissa.
“We must eradicate this disease.”