Pakistan to support Int'l organization working to eradicate polio.

Islamabad -- Pakistan has decided to completely support international organizations working to eliminate polio virus from the country.

A meeting on Friday observed that the propaganda against polio campaign was losing its grounds and parents are now agreed to administrate polio drops to their children.

The next meeting of the GPEI will be held in Dubai in November this year. The meeting will prepare strategy to eradicate polio virus from the country.

As Trump mentioned in his remarks earlier this week in Washington, Pakistani children live in one of the last places in the world still grappling with the threat of polio transmission.

Now that wild polio cases have disappeared from Nigeria over the past few years, Afghanistan is the only other country yet to eliminate the disease.

Rolling out immunization in the country has not been easy. Progress has faced obstacles, from religious hardliners and anti-vaccination propaganda to militant violence.

Most of the cases recorded in the last few years have been in tribal borderlands with Afghanistan, where conflict and a porous frontier have hindered vaccination efforts.

Today, a new threat has emerged: parents opposed to vaccinations have been reported giving their children the same mark as that used by health workers to denote an immunized child.

Though outwardly unremarkable - it is just a flick of permanent marker on their fingertip - the repercussions are grave, as it causes the vaccination teams to skip over them.

But the fight is being won, and may soon be over. Vaccination campaigns have drastically reduced the number of cases. About 45 have been reported this year; last year there were only eight.

This represents huge progress since the national vaccination programme was rolled out just 25 years ago. Back then, the disease paralyzed more than 30,000 children.

The statistics are encouraging. In the month of May alone - according...