Gaza Strip: WHO to Vaccinate Children Against Polio

Supporting Health Personeel in Gaza, July 2024 Photo: @Palestra_SLP

July 28, 2024 Hour: 7:19 pm

According to local health officials, so far, 39,000 Palestinians have died since Israel began its bombardment and ground offensive against Gaza last October.

On Saturday, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that more than one million polio vaccines will be sent to the Gaza Strip by because of the presence of poliovirus in sewage samples.

The agency’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the vaccines will be administered to children in the coming weeks.

Tedros said no cases of polio have yet been reported, but without immediate action, it is “only a matter of time before it affects the thousands of children who have been left unprotected”.

Humanitarian workers have raised concerns about the impact of a possible polio emergency in Gaza, amid disastrous health conditions marked by outbreaks of hepatitis A and other preventable diseases, along with a lack of access to medical care due to Israeli aggression.

Earlier this week @WHO and partners managed to reach Al-Shifa hospital in northern #Gaza to assess progress being made to restore emergency care and ongoing services in the hemodialysis unit.

Work is underway to rehabilitate the hospital’s former outpatient department and… pic.twitter.com/l1hHmLqJz3
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) July 28, 2024

Earlier this week, the head of the WHO health emergencies team in the occupied Palestinian territory, Ayadil Saparbekov, warned that the spread of polio and other communicable diseases could result in more people dying from preventable conditions than from conflict-related injuries.

According to local health officials, so far, 39,000 Palestinians have died since Israel began its bombardment and ground offensive against Gaza last October.

On 16 July, the WHO warned that vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 had been identified at six sites in sewage 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 UN health agency explained that poliovirus can emerge in areas where low vaccination coverage allows the weakened form of the orally administered vaccine strain of the virus to mutate into a stronger version.

With an estimated 99 per cent of children in the occupied Palestinian territory receiving 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).