GENEVA, May 24: The last three countries where polio is still paralysing children — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — said on Thursday they had enlisted Muslim women and religious leaders to allay fears of vaccination and wipe out the disease.     

Conflict and insecurity is preventing health workers from reaching hundreds of thousands of children in Afghanistan and Pakistan with doses of polio vaccine, officials said.

“Religious leaders have been very actively mobilised,” Shahnaz Wazir Ali, special assistant to Pakistan’s prime minister, who is in-charge of the polio eradication campaign, told a news briefing held during the annual ministerial meeting of the World Health Organisation.—Reuters