UN aid agencies launch polio vaccination campaign across Gaza

United Nations aid agencies began to start a polio vaccination campaign on Sunday throughout Gaza. But the effort could face major challenges arising from the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Sustaining humanitarian pauses in the fighting is critical to the success of the vaccination, which targets 640,000 children under the age of ten.

To be successful, the World Health Organization says that at least 90% of children under ten should be vaccinated within a relatively short period of time. Each child should receive two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds, the second given four weeks after the first.

Globally, the standard protocol is to give the vaccine to children at intervals, for example, at eight, 12 and 16 weeks of age, followed by a booster after three years of age.

Oral polio vaccine is made from live attenuated wild polio virus. In very rare cases—one now occurring in Gaza due to severe disruptions caused by war—a severely immunocompromised population is the catalyst for the virus to mutate into pathogenic strains known as vaccine-derived poliovirus. In turn, such variants can be circulated in the community.

Polio, also known as poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis, is a vaccine-preventable systemic viral infection. The majority of infections are asymptomatic. up to 70% of infected people show no symptoms and about 25% have mild symptoms. Paralytic poliomyelitis occurs in less than 1% of all infections. However, the mortality rate for acute paralytic polio it ranges from 5–15%. Indeed, historically, it has been a major cause of childhood mortality, acute paralysis, and lifelong disabilities. But large-scale vaccination programs since the 1950s have eliminated polio from most areas of the world. The disease is now confined to a few endemic areas, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, with sporadic outbreaks occurring from time to time scattered around the world.

Authorities declared Gaza polio-free in the late 1990s. However, the region’s health ministry late last month confirmed a case of symptomatic polio in an unvaccinated 10-month-old child in Deir Al-Balah. The baby is partially paralyzed by the disease. They have been too reports of other suspicious cases.

In addition, the virus has been found in sewage samples from sites in the Gaza cities of Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah, the World Health Organization was mentioned last month.

The fact that polio is often an asymptomatic virus enhances its ability to spread rapidly. The more people are infected, the greater the chance that there will be people suffering from serious complications such as paralysis and respiratory failure.

The pathogen is was transmitted from contact with the feces of an infected child or drinking water or food contaminated with feces. Crowded living conditions, poor sanitation, limited access to clean water and raw sewage flowing openly between tents in refugee camps in Gaza increase the risk of all kinds of infectious diseases, both bacterial and viral, including polio. And Gaza’s broken health care system compounds the problem in which the polio virus can spread unchecked.

The first full day of the first three-day vaccination campaign began on Sunday. A second three-day window will begin four weeks from now. More than 2,000 health workers are involved in this potentially dangerous mission. Development depends on pauses in fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters. Other challenges include the cold chain storage required for vaccines to maintain potency and the ability of groups of people participating in the immunization effort to reach some of the more than 600 vaccination sites located throughout the Gaza Strip.