Polio Meeting to be Held in Kabul

Afghanistan and Pakistan will meet in Kabul with the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss how to fight polio in the region. Both countries have the highest rates of the disease in the world, along with Nigeria.

Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) spokesman Hafiz Fayaz said Monday that the meeting will focus on ways to better fight the spread of the disease, and on eradicating it altogether.

"Representatives of Afghan and Pakistani governments will hold a meeting aiming to eradicate polio and ways to seriously combat the disease. The meeting was held in Pakistan annually but this time it will be held in Kabul," Fayaz told TOLOnews on Monday.

He added that if the disease was not wiped out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it may spread to other central Asian countries.

The MoPH had previously claimed that polio would be completely eradicated from Afghanistan by 2013, but recent reports show that in 2011 there were some 80 known cases of polio in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar and Helmand provinces.