Pakistani attacks on aid workers: Killing disease ON DECEMBER 18th five health workers, all women, were gunned down in Pakistan in carefully planned and co-ordinated shootings. They were administering polio vaccinations. The following day a vaccination supervisor and her driver were killed. Several health workers are critically injured. The youngest killed was a 17-year-old in the north-western town of Peshawar. Others were working in poor, ethnic Pushtun districts in the southern megacity of Karachi, where polio workers have already been killed this year. The Pakistani Taliban or allied groups are the murderers, and they have now caused the UN to suspend its campaign to eradicate polio in Pakistan. The country is one of only three countries left where polio is endemic, leading the world in 2011 in cases of the crippling childhood disease. It had been making progress in 2012. The country, backed by the UN, was striving urgently to immunise 34m children. Almost all the polio cases are among Pushtuns, who live mainly in north-west Pakistan or in Karachi. They also form the main ethnic group in the Pakistani Taliban. The extremists spread the rumour that polio drops are a Western conspiracy to sterilise Muslims. As it is, the credibility of health workers has been badly shaken by the revelation in 2011 that the CIA had recruited a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi. He set up a fake vaccination programme, for hepatitis B, as part of the hunt that finally killed Osama bin Laden. Militants also use polio to press the government. They say they will refuse to allow immunisations in North or South Waziristan, part of the wild tribal areas, unless attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft are stopped. The climate for humanitarian workers has not been improved by the authorities. They have harassed aid professionals, restricting their movements and limiting visas, fearing that spies lurk among them. In 2012 the Red Cross halted much of its work in Pakistan after a British doctor was kidnapped in the western city of Quetta and beheaded. The prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, insists that "we will stay the course until polio is wiped out." If the country fails, new generations of children will have their lives blighted by this wholly preventable disease.