Hundreds of parents in Pakistan were thrown in jail after they refused to vaccinate their children against polio, officials said.
Pakistani authorities in Peshawar arrested 471 individuals and charged them with endangering public security after it was discovered that they weren’t protecting their kids from the highly contagious viral infection.
“There were chronic refusals and they were asking other parents as well to refuse polio drops to their children,” Peshawar police commissioner Riaz Khan Mehsud told NBC News. “This was the last option to arrest them.”
Polio is considered endemic in Pakistan, but locals have been too scared to support the vaccinations after Taliban leaders and other terror clerics spoke out against the practice and banned it, claiming they were all part of a Western plot to sterilize children.
As a result of their paranoia, 64 people have been assassinated in order to prevent the vaccinations, according to Reuters.
In one incident last March, the Taliban attacked a polio vaccination team delivering vaccines in the tribal region known as the Khyber Agency.
Eleven people were killed — including an 8-year-old child — as a roadside bomb tore through the two vans they were riding in.
Health teams in parts of the northwest region of Pakistan are now forced to travel with armed guards, NBC News reports.
Pervez Kamal Khan, who is the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government director general of health services, said Monday that the recent refusals to vaccinate had forced authorities to step in and do something drastic.
“[The arrests were] the last resort as there was no other option,” he explained. “There is a lot of pressure on the local administration to tackle these refusals.”
Feroz Shah, a Peshawar district spokesman, added that this never-before-seen tactic of wrangling the parents all at once “shows determination of the government to eradicate polio.”
Polio is considered a crippling and extremely infectious disease that swarms the nervous system — causing paralysis or even death within hours of being infected, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus can spread from person to person and is believed to be contracted through the mouth. The CDC says that 99 children out of 100 who receive the recommended doses of vaccine “will be protected from polio.”
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39, forcing him to use a wheelchair that he designed himself in order to keep the disease a secret.