There are more cases of polio in Balochistan than there are in Somalia and this is when that country has suffered an outbreak of the disease this year while it doesn't have a government.

It seems Balochistan does not either; at least not the sort that can protect its people, particularly its polio workers.

If further proof of this was needed, Wednesday provided it: a team of polio workers was attacked by gunmen who accosted the van they were traveling in. The crime; doing the thankless, dangerous work of weaving through the country’s narrow lanes and suffering suburbs to inoculate its millions against a disease that cripples and kills.

For this, four were killed, bringing the total of dead polio workers to 65 since the first targeted attack in December 2012.

Also read: Pakistan responsible for 80pc polio cases: WHO

Almost no one came to their aid even after the attack. When the team leader, bleeding and injured, managed to jump off the vehicle screaming for help for her dead and dying colleagues, her cries went unheard.

“I screamed to a policeman for help but he just walked away,” she told reporters later.

By the time a passing motorcyclist finally heard her pleas, four of her seven member team already lay dead. Citizens who died in the service of an apathetic nation; undeserving of their sacrifice, unfeeling for their loss.

Pakistan is a world leader in polio cases now. It has more of them than both Afghanistan and Nigeria, the two other countries where the disease is still active. Pakistanis, already unwelcome beyond their borders, are likely to see increasing repercussions of this.

The militant project against polio is simple; kill the vaccinators, prevent the vaccinations and transform Pakistan into the isolated petri dish of the pestilence, disconnected from the rest of the world by its vulnerability to plague.

Pakistan’s alienated millions, welcome nowhere else, will all fall happily into the darkness of militancy, the violence of extremism, making up murderous mobs that lynch and stone and bomb and kill. The slide is already visible; bloody and palpable.

Also read: WHO puts shackles on Pakistan over polio

In the details of Pakistan’s polio debacle there is enough blame to taint everyone.