News - World: Gunmen have shot dead three female polio vaccination health workers in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar, local officials say.

The women, involved in a nationwide polio immunization program, were killed in two separate attacks in the provincial capital city of Jalalabad on Tuesday.

The women were reportedly on duty going from house to house to innoculate children.

Ghulam Dastagir Nazari, the head of the immunization program at Afghanistan's Health Ministry, said an explosion took place at the entrance to the health department for the province of Nangarhar late on Tuesday morning. Around the same time, gunmen killed the vaccination workers at two separate locations in the provincial capital city.

The attacks came in the same week that a polio vaccination campaign for 2021 kicked off across violence-wracked Afghanistan. The program is led by the Afghan Health Ministry, with the involvement of the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF. Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan are the only two countries where the disease is still endemic.

No group or individual has claimed responsibility for the latest explosion and shootings.

Militant outfits, including the Taliban, have targeted health workers in the past.

Last year, the UN mission to Afghanistan warned that health workers were increasingly at risk in the country. An assault on a Kabul maternity ward in May 2020 killed at least two dozen people, including mothers and newborn babies.

Also recently, a wave of attacks has targeted female medical and media workers.

Earlier in March, a bomb explosion targeted a female doctor in Jalalabad, killing her and wounding a child.

Days before that attack, Daesh terrorists shot dead three female media workers while they were on their way home from work in Jalalabad in two separate attacks.