Gaza sees first polio case in 25 years as UN calls for mass vaccinations
Gaza has recorded its first case of polio in 25 years, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported Friday, after UN chief António Guterres called for a pause in the war between Israel and Hamas to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.
Tests in Jordan have confirmed that the victim is an unvaccinated 10-month-old baby from the central Gaza Strip, the Health Ministry in Ramallah said.
According to the UN, Gaza, which has been in the throes of war for 11 months now, has not had a single case of polio recorded in 25 years. However, in June, samples of wastewater from the area were found to contain type 2 poliovirus.
“Doctors suspected the presence of symptoms consistent with polio,” the Ministry of Health said. “After conducting the necessary tests in the Jordanian capital Amman, the infection was confirmed.”
The case came to light shortly after Guterres called for two seven-day pauses in the war in Gaza to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.
Poliovirus, which is usually spread through sewage and polluted water, is highly contagious. It can cause disfigurement and paralysis and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.
The UN health and children’s agencies said they had drawn up detailed plans to reach children in the besieged Palestinian territory and that they could begin this month. But that would require pauses in the 10-month war between Israel and Hamas, they said.
“Preventing and containing the spread of polio will require a massive, coordinated and urgent effort,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “I call on all parties to provide immediate concrete guarantees for humanitarian pauses in the campaign.”
The World Health Organization and the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, have announced that they are planning two seven-day vaccination campaigns against poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) in the Gaza Strip starting in late August.
“These pauses in the fighting would allow children and families to safely reach health care, and would allow community workers to reach children who cannot access health care for polio vaccination,” the agencies said in a statement.
After 25 years without polio, its resurgence in the Gaza Strip would pose a threat to neighbouring countries, it added. “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region.”
During each round of the campaign, the Gaza Ministry of Health, together with UN agencies, would provide “two drops of the new oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) to more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age”.
More than 1.6 million doses of nOPV2 were expected to be transported through Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport “by the end of August,” the statement said.
The war was sparked by Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, killing 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
The death toll from Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza on Thursday rose to over 40,000, the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza said. The ministry did not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant casualties.