The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that vaccines will be administered to children in the coming weeks.
He noted that no cases of polio have yet been recorded, but that without immediate action, it would be “It is only a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected.”
Aid workers have expressed deep concern about the impact of a possible polio emergency in Gaza, amid dire health conditions marked by Outbreaks of hepatitis A and countless other preventable diseasesalong with lack of access to health care, due to the war.
Crisis of preventable deaths
Earlier this week, Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, head of the WHO health emergencies team in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned that the spread of polio and other communicable diseases could lead to more people dying from preventable diseases than from war-related injuries (currently 39,000, according to local health authorities).
On July 16, the WHO said that vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 had been identified at six locations in wastewater samples collected last month in Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah, two Gaza towns left in ruins after nearly 10 months of intense Israeli bombardment.
The WHO explained that the polio virus can emerge in areas where poor vaccination coverage allows the weakened form of the virus strain in the orally administered vaccine to mutate into a stronger version.
Pre-war profits were lost
Before the war, sparked by Hamas-led terror attacks in several locations in southern Israel, young people in Gaza had access to “robust” routine vaccination services, the UN health agency insisted on Friday.
But while an estimated 99 per cent of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory received their third dose of polio vaccine in 2022, this figure dropped to 89 per cent in 2023, according to the latest routine immunization estimates from WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
As part of collective efforts to combat the circulating poliovirus type 2 variant in Gaza and elsewhere, WHO on Thursday convened health ministers from across the Eastern Mediterranean region.
Gaza, a paradise for polio
““I witnessed first-hand the living conditions that greatly facilitate the spread of polio and other diseases.” “This is an important moment … to come together and act quickly and decisively to contain this outbreak, for the children of Gaza,” said Dr Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, who convened the meeting.
Measures agreed at the meeting included intensified surveillance and “multiple mass polio immunization campaigns” that can be integrated with the provision of other crucial health services, “where possible.”
The representatives also called for a “safe and enabling environment” for the implementation of vaccination “through a ceasefire or days of tranquility, to allow measures to be taken to prevent polio from paralyzing children in Gaza and surrounding areas and countries.”
The latest meeting of the Regional Subcommittee on Polio Eradication and Polio Outbreaks also highlighted the urgent need to stop all forms of poliovirus in the Eastern Mediterranean, home to the last two countries in the world with endemic transmission of wild poliovirus: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Countries in the region are also facing active outbreaks of poliovirus variants, including Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
