The World Health Organization (WHO) is sending more than a million polio vaccines to Gaza to be administered in the coming weeks to prevent children from becoming infected after the virus was detected in sewage samples, its head said on Friday (26).
“Although no cases of polio have been reported to date, without immediate action it is only a matter of time before the virus reaches thousands of children who have been left unprotected,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in an opinion piece published in the British newspaper The Guardian.
He wrote that children under five are most at risk of contracting the viral disease, especially babies under two, as normal vaccination campaigns have been disrupted by more than nine months of conflict.
Polio, which is transmitted primarily through the fecal-oral route, is a highly infectious virus that can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis. Polio cases have declined by 99 percent worldwide since 1988, thanks to mass vaccination campaigns, and efforts continue to eradicate it completely.
The Israeli military said on Sunday it would begin offering the polio vaccine to soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip after remnants of the virus were found in test samples in the enclave.
In addition to polio, the United Nations last week reported a widespread increase in cases of hepatitis A, dysentery and gastroenteritis as sanitation conditions deteriorate in Gaza, with sewage spilling into streets near some camps for displaced people.
Source: CNN Brasil
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