He wondered aloud where the crime is in the social work for which he gets only 250 rupees (2.5 dollars) a day to administer the oral vaccine to children under 5 years old. Ali is one of the lucky ones. At least nine anti-polio workers, including six women, have been killed in a string of gun attacks across country this week against teams working on a UN-backed programme to eradicate polio.
"My female colleagues died right in front of my eyes and I myself suffered four bullet wounds," he said, but added he was "determined to get back in the field after recovering."Most of the attacks, all carried out by gunmen on motorcycles, took place in Karachi, the country's largest city and capital of Sindh province, with the others in Peshawar.
Authorities suspended the vaccination efforts across Sindh and parts of the north-west. The United Nations agencies pulled all their staff off field operations. "We need to assess the situation ... to make sure the safety and security of our personnel supporting the campaign is intact," said Elias Durry, chief co-ordinator for polio eradication in Pakistan with the UN's World Health Organisation (WHO).
The government has approximately 250,000 people working on the campaign, who usually volunteer for little or no remuneration, and have other jobs for most of the year. The goal was to reach 18 million children this week. No group has claimed responsibility for this week's attacks, but suspicion has fallen on the Taliban, who have repeatedly threatened anti-polio workers in the past. Earlier this year, they blocked the immunisation drive in Waziristan.
Rumours abound that the immunisation caused infertility, and is a Western plot to sterilise Muslims. Public wariness was also heightened last year when it was revealed that a doctor used the cover of an immunisation campaign to help US intelligence track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Insurgents have said the polio programme is another cover, providing information for the US to aim its drone strikes at Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in the tribal region along the Afghan border.
Civilian deaths from these drone strikes have caused public outrage and anti-US sentiment. One health worker, a polio survivor himself, said his colleagues were being targeted for their attempts to debunk the myths about the campaign. "We have been successfully removing the misperceptions about the anti-polio vaccination drive and there is a strong possibility that this displeased its opponents," Abrar Hussain told dpa.
Hussain, 25, was struck by the crippling disease when he was three years old, and now walks with crutches. He says the attacks will not deter him from his mission to raise awareness of the disease from his personal example.
Shahnaz Wazirali, an official of the prime minister's office in charge of polio eradication, said he hoped the thousands of health workers would not be put off for too long. The vaccination programme has brought figures down from several thousand a year in the 1990s to under a hundred during the 2000s, but cases saw a hike last year to 198 amid resistance to inoculation, according to the WHO. However, an emergency action plan has helped to bring the figure down to 56 this year so far.
Most were in Pashtun-dominated areas in the volatile north-western region, where Taliban and other Islamists hold greater sway than the government or international health organisations. But not all Muslims are opposed to the vaccinations. Tahir Ashrafi, head of a council of moderate clerics, described the attack as "brutal and cruel." Talking to dpa, he said the imams of nearly 25,000 mosques across country would condemn the killings in their sermons during Friday prayers. "There is no room for such actions either in Islam or in the Pakistani custom," Ashrafi said. "Those responsible for these acts are beasts."