Aid groups want Israel to halt Gaza bombing to combat Polio outbreak

The threat of Polio is rising fast in Gaza, prompting aid groups to call for an urgent pause in the war so they can ramp up vaccinations and head off a full-blown outbreak. At least one case has been confirmed, others are suspected and the virus was detected in wastewater in six different locations in July.

The territory has become a breeding ground for the virus, aid groups say. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are crowded into tent camps lacking clean water or proper disposal of sewage and garbage.

To avert a widespread outbreak, aid groups are preparing to vaccinate more than 600,000 children in the coming weeks. They say the ambitious vaccination plans are impossible, though, without a pause in Israel's war on Gaza.

“We are anticipating and preparing for the worst-case scenario of a polio outbreak in the coming weeks or month,” Francis Hughes, the Gaza Response Director at CARE International, told The Associated Press.

The World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the United Nations Children's Agency said in a joint statement on Friday that, at a minimum, a seven-day pause is needed to carry out a mass vaccination plan.

The UN aims to bring 1.6 million doses of polio vaccine into Gaza, where sanitation and water systems have been destroyed, leaving open pits of human waste in crowded tent camps. Families living in the camps have little clean water or even soap to maintain hygiene and sometimes use wastewater to drink or clean clothes and dishes.

Urgent intervention

At least 225 informal waste disposal sites and landfills have cropped up around Gaza — many close to where families are sheltering, according to a report released in July by PAX, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that used satellite imagery to track the sites.

Polio, which is highly contagious and transmits mainly through contact with contaminated faeces, water or food, can cause difficulty breathing and irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. It strikes young children in particular and is sometimes fatal.

The aid group Mercy Corps estimates some 50,000 babies born since the war began have not been immunized against polio.

WHO and UNICEF said Friday that three children are suspected of being infected and that their stool samples were being tested by a laboratory in Jordan. The Ministry of Health in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank said late Friday that tests conducted in Jordan confirmed one case in a 10-month-old child in Gaza. It was not immediately clear if this was one of the cases cited by WHO.

Aid workers anticipate the number of suspected cases will rise, and worry that the disease could be hard to contain without urgent intervention.

“We are not optimistic because we know that doctors could also be missing the warning signs,” said Hughes of CARE International.