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PESHAWAR: Pakistan has confirmed two new polio cases in its northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bringing the total number of children affected by the crippling virus this year to 23, health authorities said on Tuesday.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where polio remains endemic. Pakistan made significant progress in curbing the virus, with annual cases dropping from around 20,000 in the early 1990s to just eight in 2018. Pakistan reported six cases in 2023 and only one in 2021, but the country saw a sharp resurgence in 2024 with 74 cases recorded.

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 (OPV) for every child under five during each campaign, alongside timely completion of all routine immunizations.

“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, has confirmed two new poliovirus cases from South Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one from District Tank and the other from District North Waziristan,” the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio Eradication said in a statement.

The cases include a 16-month-old girl from Union Council Mullazai in District Tank and a 24-month-old girl from Union Council Miran Shah-3 in District North Waziristan. 

Of the 23 confirmed cases so far this year, 15 have been reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, six in Sindh, and one each in Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan.

Health authorities noted that despite major progress in recent years, the continued detection of polio cases in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was alarming. 

“It underscores that children in hard-to-access areas and those with low vaccine acceptance continue to be at risk. However, the National and Provincial Emergency Operations Centers are taking all possible measures to ensure the implementation of high-quality vaccination campaigns,” the statement added.

To stop transmission, the National Emergency Operations Center has drawn up a vaccination campaign schedule for the upcoming low-transmission season. 

“The first campaign of the season will be conducted from September 1–7, 2025, while in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the campaign will commence on September 15. More than 28 million under-5 children will receive polio drops in door-to-door vaccination campaign,” the statement said.

The center stressed that eliminating polio required collective responsibility.

 “Polio eradication is a shared responsibility,” it said, urging parents to ensure children complete all recommended doses. 

The statement added that communities could play their part by supporting vaccination campaigns, countering misinformation and encouraging others to immunize.

Past efforts to eradicate the virus have been repeatedly undermined by vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners, who claim immunization is a foreign plot to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western espionage. 

Militant groups have also frequently targeted polio vaccination teams and the security personnel assigned to protect them, particularly in KP and Balochistan.

HYDERABAD, Pakistan: On her 99th birthday in May 2017, Dharam Mukhi sat thousands of miles away in the United States when her family unveiled an extraordinary gift: a video chronicling three centuries of the Mukhi family’s legacy and the painstaking restoration of her childhood home in Sindh, Pakistan.

The video brought back the carved wooden galleries, the Italian cupola and the marble staircase of the mansion she had left behind when her family left Hyderabad during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and the violence and upheaval that followed. 

“I feel like I am back home,” she told her son, Dr. Suresh Bhavnani. Twenty days later, she passed away.

Built in 1921 by her uncle Jethanand Mukhi, a Hindu politician and philanthropist, the three-story Mukhi House was more than a residence. With its Corinthian columns, mosaic floors, stained glass, and frescoed walls, it stood as a palace at the heart of Hyderabad. Its halls hosted luminaries of the era — Indian National Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and Sindh’s pre-Partition chief minister, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, among others.

“They considered it a palace, not just a house,” said historian and archaeologist Dr. Kaleemullah Lashari, who later led its restoration. “They built it with that vision and lived in it to the fullest.”

After Jethanand’s death, his brother Gobindram Mukhi, Dharam’s father, carried forward the family’s civic leadership. He was elected to the Sindh government as a voice for the Hindu community, despite threats and assassination attempts. 

But Partition forced the Mukhis to move their children to Bombay while Gobindram and his wife returned frequently to manage affairs, clinging to the hope of resettling in Hyderabad.

That hope ended abruptly in 1957 when Gobindram died in a road accident near Thatta. The family never returned. The mansion, once the jewel of Hyderabad, was reduced to decades of disrepair. It became a government office, then a girls’ school, then a paramilitary checkpoint. 

Fires, neglect and scavengers stripped it of its grandeur. 

“Its vital structural elements had grown weak,” Lashari recalled of his first visit to the decaying building.”

The Mukhi family, still in possession of the property papers, offered the house to the people of Sindh on one condition: that it be conserved and turned into a museum. 

Declared a heritage site by the Sindh government, restoration began in 2009. The work was arduous, from sourcing tiles to match originals to recreating stained glass, and training artisans to revive lost techniques.

By 2013, the house had been restored to its former glory, though bureaucratic inertia kept it closed to the public for years. From the US, Dr. Bhavnani campaigned to keep the project alive, circulating videos such as Legends of the Mukhi House and urging Sindhi youth to reclaim the site as part of their cultural inheritance.

“When the place was finally turned into a museum and inaugurated, I credited my late grandfather with inspiring my persistence,” Dr. Bhavnani said. “He was living the role of a Mukhi who had promised to serve the community that had elected him, and who were now vulnerable as they had chosen to stay back in Sindh.”

Today, the museum preserves not just architecture but memory. Dharam’s photographs line the first floor: her beside the family’s first car, near Hyderabad’s first telephone, at garden parties with colonial administrators. 

“We have displayed her photographs in the museum as part of the exhibition,” said Naeem Ahmed Khan, a museum official.

Schoolchildren now walk through its sunlit galleries where once statesmen and reformers debated Sindh’s future. 

For Lashari, the building is a symbol of generosity across borders and generations: 

“Just think about how noble the purpose is. A family, which no longer resides here, agreed … to allow their property to be turned into a museum for the benefit of the general public.”