Punjab polio drive 21 to 27 September: 10.64m children in 13 districts

Punjab will run its next anti-polio campaign from 21 to 27 September 2026, targeting more than 10.64 million children under five. The provincial task force cleared the plan on Wednesday in a meeting chaired by Health Minister Khawaja Salman Rafique, with Chief Secretary Zahid Akhtar Zaman also attending.

Which districts, and for how long

Thirteen districts are covered. Eight get full coverage: Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Dera Ghazi Khan, Muzaffargarh, Rajanpur, Rahim Yar Khan and Sheikhupura. Five get targeted coverage in selected union councils only: Attock, Bahawalpur, Faisalabad, Kasur and Mianwali.

Lahore runs the full seven days. The other districts run a four-day campaign. In total the drive covers 1,376 union councils.

The teams on the ground

77,488 workers are being deployed in 39,774 teams:

• 36,420 mobile teams going door to door, between them responsible for more than 8.16 million children
• 2,060 fixed teams at health centres and hospitals
• 1,294 transit teams at bus stands, toll plazas and railway crossings

The transit teams matter more than they look. A large share of missed children in Punjab are travelling with families on the day the mobile team knocks, and the transit point is the only chance to reach them that week.

Why the drive is happening now

Pakistan has confirmed four wild poliovirus cases in 2026. The most recent was reported from Bannu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the second week of September. Four is a sharp fall from the peaks of recent years, but the virus is still circulating, and a case anywhere in the country puts unvaccinated children in Punjab at risk because families move constantly between provinces.

What parents actually need to do

Every child under five gets the drops, including a child who was vaccinated in the last campaign. The oral polio vaccine is designed to be repeated: each dose adds to the protection, and a single dose is not considered enough.

A few practical points:

• Teams mark the child's little finger and chalk a code on the door. If the mark is there, that child is recorded as covered.
• If nobody comes to your door during the campaign window, take the child to the nearest Basic Health Unit or Rural Health Centre, or to a transit team at a bus stand.
• Children born since the last round are the ones most often missed. If your child turned a few weeks old recently, they are still eligible.
• If you are not sure whether your child is still under five on campaign day, check the exact age with our age calculator rather than guessing from the birth year.

Refusals

Refusal cases in Punjab are concentrated in a handful of urban union councils, and district administrations usually send a supervisor or a local religious figure back to households that turn teams away. Parents who have a genuine medical question about the drops should ask the team's area in-charge or their own paediatrician rather than turning the team away at the gate, because a refusal is logged and the child is counted as missed for that round.