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WAR ZONE - Health officials in the besieged Gaza Strip declared a polio epidemic on Monday and attributed the crisis to "brutal Israeli aggression," citing the large-scale destruction of water sanitation and waste management infrastructure.
In a statement, Gaza's Ministry of Health said that the Palestinian enclave is now a "polio epidemic zone" and urged immediate international action to end Israel's assault and "find radical solutions" to the territory's lack of clean water, hygiene products, and sanitation facilities.
The crisis, according to the health ministry, poses a threat to Gaza as well as neighboring countries and marks "a setback for the global polio eradication program."
While a sweeping vaccination campaign eliminated wild poliovirus from Gaza more than two decades ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that poliovirus had been identified in sewage samples in six locations in the enclave, where most of the population is displaced and attempting to survive in areas surrounded by waste and rotting garbage.
In a recent report, the global humanitarian group Oxfam described such conditions as "ripe for the outbreak of epidemics."
The WHO said last week that it would send more than a million polio vaccines to Gaza following the discovery of poliovirus inside the occupied territory.
The United Nations agency noted that while 99% of children in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip received their third dose of the polio vaccine in 2022, the innoculation rate fell to 89% last year as many newborns were not vaccinated due to what WHO-Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described as "the decimation of the health system" by Israeli forces.
"While no cases of polio have been recorded yet, without immediate action, it is just a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected," Tedros wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian last week. "Children under five are at risk, and especially infants under two because many have not been vaccinated over the nine months of conflict."
"While immediate efforts to reach every child with polio vaccines are now being put into motion," he added, "ultimately, a cease-fire and free-flowing aid are the only definite ways to protect people and prevent an explosive outbreak."
(Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams where this article was first published.)
