The Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry announced Friday the first confirmed case of polio in the Gaza Strip, which has been free of the disease for 25 years according to the UN, which is calling for “humanitarian pauses” to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.
A first case was confirmed in the Palestinian territory ravaged for more than ten months following analyses of stool samples from three Gazan children “presenting suspected acute flaccid paralysis, a common symptom of poliomyelitis” at the Jordanian national polio laboratory.
According to the Palestinian ministry, it was a “ten-month-old baby who had not been vaccinated” in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the besieged Palestinian territory, deprived of electricity, heavily rationed in water and where almost all of the 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced by the war.
A few hours earlier on Friday, UN chief Antonio Guterres had called on “all parties to immediately provide concrete assurances guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the vaccination campaign.”
Polio break needed
“It is impossible to conduct a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of war,” Mr. Guterres insisted. “A polio pause is necessary.”
Before him, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF had called for “seven-day” humanitarian pauses to allow two vaccination campaigns for more than 640,000 children under ten.
These two rounds “are expected to be launched in late August and September 2024 across the Gaza Strip to prevent the spread of the currently circulating variant,” known as cVDPV2, the two agencies said.
Each break should last seven days, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told AFP.
The poliovirus was first detected in July in sewage samples collected in late June in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, and Deir el-Balah, recall the WHO and UNICEF, while the Palestinian territory has been free of this disease for 25 years, according to the UN.
More than 1.6 million doses of the nOPV2 vaccine are expected to be delivered to Gaza by the end of August, the statement said.
The vaccines will then be administered by 708 teams in each municipality in the Gaza Strip.
The UN stresses that vaccination coverage must be at least 95% in each vaccination campaign to prevent the spread of polio, “given that health, water and sanitation systems are severely disrupted in Gaza.”
No borders for polio
It will also take money, fuel for vaccination teams, and functioning internet and telephone networks to inform the population.
Thus, “the entry of polio experts”, insisted Antonio Guterres, while only a handful of humanitarians still manage to enter and leave the territory, all of whose entrances are now held by Israel.
A widespread threat just forty years ago, polio – which can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours – has largely disappeared from the world thanks to vaccines.
But another form of poliovirus may be spreading: one that mutated from the source originally contained in the oral polio vaccine (OPV). It is this vaccine-derived poliovirus that has been found in Gaza.
And polio “does not care about demarcation lines,” Antonio Guterres insisted, stressing the threat “not only to children in Gaza, but also in neighboring countries.”