After confirming polio in eight children Friday, Pakistan has broken its own 14-year-old record of highest cases in a year, Rana Mohammad Safdar, a senior official at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad, said on Saturday. The previous modern record had stood at 199 cases in 2000 - though that represented 366 days, rather than just nine months.

"We are sad to announce that the number of polio cases is now all-time high in Pakistan," Safdar told The Associated Press news agency on Saturday.

Polio remains endemic in just three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. The highly contagious virus transmits best in unsanitary conditions, making vaccination necessary. Safdar said that health officials had launched another nationwide anti-polio drive earlier in the week in an attempt to get all of Pakistan's 34 million children vaccinated.

"New polio cases are surfacing because of those children who could not be immunized against the disease in tribal regions," Safdar told AP. "We were expecting this alarming increase in polio cases."

The number of cases reached a low of 28 in 2005 but rose to 198 in 2011, with 93 cases recorded in 2013. As Pakistan moves into its post-monsoon period, officials fear the final figure for 2014 could rise as high as 250. The highly infectious disease affects mainly children younger than 5 years old and can cause paralysis in a matter of hours, with some cases being potentially fatal.

'Alarming increase'

The Taliban has banned immunizations and killed about 60 polio workers or police escorting them in Pakistan since 2012. The group increased attacks after it became known that Dr. Shakil Afridi had offered a program of hepatitis vaccinations in the northwestern city of Abbottabad as a cover for his CIA-backed effort to obtain DNA samples from children at a local compound where Osama bin Laden lived. US Navy Seals went on to kill the al Qaeda leader there in 2011.

"All these cases were recorded in the areas where we have security problems," Saira Afzal Tarar, Pakistan's deputy health minister, told the private TV channel Express News.

Officials said the strain of the virus most prevalent in Pakistan had spread to neighboring Afghanistan, which has recorded a total of seven cases this year.

mkg/tj (AFP, dpa, AP)