Pakistan's Fifth Polio Case of 2026 Confirmed in Bannu, Where Insecurity Limits Vaccination Access

A 17-month-old girl in Bannu district has become Pakistan's fifth confirmed wild poliovirus case of 2026, the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) said on September 29. It is the fourth case this year from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Bannu division, where officials say insecurity has kept vaccination teams from reaching some children.

The latest case

The child is from the Khandar Khankhel union council of Domel tehsil in Bannu district, Geo News reported. According to the NEOC, four of Pakistan's five cases this year have been in Bannu division, three of them in Bannu district. The year's first case, reported in early March, was a four-year-old in Sujawal district, Sindh, and the others came from Bannu and North Waziristan, The Express Tribune reported when the fourth case was announced on September 11.

Pakistan recorded 31 cases in 2025: 20 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, nine in Sindh, and one each in Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan. The NEOC says transmission has declined since 2025 but that the virus persists in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Why Bannu specifically

Officials have tied Bannu's cases to access. When the fourth case was confirmed in the Nurar union council of Bannu's Miryan tehsil, the NEOC said vaccination teams had not been able to reach children there consistently since 2025 because of a lack of security, and that security-related access problems across Bannu division had left children missing vaccinations.

The WHO's polio emergency committee, which extended Pakistan's polio travel measures for another three months, said about 250,000 children in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remain unreached, mainly because of insecurity.

The national picture

According to the NEOC, polio cases in Pakistan have fallen by 99.8% from an estimated 20,000 a year in the early 1990s to 31 in 2025, with five reported so far in 2026. The latest case was confirmed days after a week-long sub-national campaign that ran from September 21 to 27, targeting more than 31 million children under five in 115 districts.

Build Better Pakistan's Health Desk tracks Pakistan's polio eradication campaign and will report on the next case count update and any change in Bannu's security-linked access constraints.