Over 37 million children have been vaccinated during the first three days of the ongoing national campaign to eradicate polio in Pakistan, the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) said on Thursday.

Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, alongside Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic. So far, the country has recorded 30 polio cases this year, with the highest number of cases in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 19.

The year’s last vaccination campaign against the crippling disease was launched by Health Minister Mustafa Kamal on December 11. The week-long campaign, which began on December 15, is aimed at vaccinating over 45m children under the age of five.

According to NEOC, polio drops have been administered to 20.8m children in Punjab, over 7.4m in Sindh, 6.1m in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 2.1m in Balochistan, 417,000 in Islamabad, 256,000 in Gilgit-Baltistan and 689,000 children in Azad Jammu and Kashmir during the first three days of the campaign.

NEOC said in a statement that over 400,000 polio workers had been going door to door to administer polio drops to children during the vaccination campaign. It called on parents to ensure that their children under five years of age were administered the vaccine.

“The success of the national polio campaign is not possible without the full participation of parents and the community,” NEOC stressed, warning that “polio is an incurable disease that leaves children with lifelong disabilities”.

Polio is a highly infectious and incurable disease that can cause lifelong paralysis. The only effective protection is through repeated doses of the oral polio vaccine for every child under five, along with the timely completion of all essential immunisations.