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Gunmen kill seven police guarding polio team in Pakistan: officials

– Frequent target –

Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world where polio, a crippling childhood disease, remains endemic.

Attempts to eradicate it have been badly hit by militant attacks on immunisation teams that have claimed more than 100 lives since December 2012.

In 2014 the number of polio cases recorded in Pakistan soared to 306, the highest in 14 years, before falling to 54 in 2015.

The most recent attack came in January, when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a polio vaccination centre in the southwestern city of Quetta, killing 15 people – two civilians and 13 security officials.

Authorities want to vaccinate 35 million children under the age of five, wiping out the disease by the end of 2016.

In Karachi, a heaving metropolis of around 20 million, authorities have enlisted 2,500 female “neighbourhood vaccinators” drawn from local communities to support the programme.

Islamist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.

The terror chief was killed during a US special forces raid in 2011.

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