TEHRAN - More than 19,000 foreign nationals under the age of 5 were vaccinated against polio in Isfahan Province, IRNA reported on Thursday.

Polio, a highly infectious and contagious disease, is caused by a virus that may cause paralysis and is easily preventable by the polio vaccine.

In the door–to-door process, medical teams walked in neighborhoods and gave children 5 and younger the oral polio vaccine (OPV), while also checking families for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP).

An official at Isfahan’s healthcare center said polio vaccination campaign for children was launched in 1994 in Iran.

Esmail Akhtar said that this year alone (Iranian calendar began on March 21, 2015) out of 19,300 foreign national children, mainly Afghani, receiving the oral polio vaccine throughout Isfahan Province, 9500 were residing inside the city of Isfahan.

Akhtar was grateful that the families of children were very cooperative with the medical teams.

Isfahan, one of the provinces launching the polio vaccination campaign for foreign children, had the vaccination administered in two phases in the spring.

Mahdi Farsi, another official at the center, also said Iran has not been able to announce the eradication of polio due to human traffic in its eastern and north eastern borders; however, there are intensive programs under way for all children, even for the illegal nationals to be inoculated against the polio virus.

In its northeastern and eastern sides, Iran shares long borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, two of the few countries in the world where polio is still endemic, making Iran vulnerable to the transmission of the disease.