From the Gaza Strip under the bombs comes the SOS polio, with the first case detected in 25 years. The Palestinian Ministry of Health issued it, a full month and a half after the discovery, on June 23, of the poliovirus type 2 in samples of sewage or stagnant water with which the almost two million Palestinians displaced within the enclave live. A new health crisis that has pushed WHO and UNICEF to ask for two seven-day humanitarian truces in the fighting to allow over 640,000 children to be vaccinated against polio.
The disease, which is highly contagious and mainly affects adolescents and especially children, causes symptoms such as high fever, headache, muscle stiffness and vomiting, can cause deformities or irreversible muscle paralysis of the limbs in severe cases and in 10% of severe cases leads to death due to paralysis of the respiratory tract. The diagnosis was confirmed by a laboratory in Jordan and so far concerns a child of only 10 months, born after the war had already begun and not vaccinated.
For the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, "preventing and containing the spread of polio will require a massive, coordinated and urgent effort", and for this reason he "appealed to all parties involved to immediately and concretely ensure that they will guarantee a humanitarian pause for the vaccination campaign" against poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2), planned by the UN to begin at the end of August. But polio is only the latest scourge to hit the population of Gaza, where according to a recent UNRWA report only 12 of the 16 hospitals, partly functioning, are accessible due to the dangers of war and physical barriers, including destroyed roads, while about a hundred medical points are functioning.
According to estimates by the food security NGO Fews Net, between 79,000 and 86,000 tons of food aid were brought to Gaza in July, an increase from 47,000 to 61,000 in June, but with a higher prevalence of commercial food over humanitarian food, meaning fewer families could afford to buy it. As for water supplies, the Palestinian enclave relies mainly on wells and desalination plants: infrastructure that, as Oxfam reports, is largely destroyed.
The result is that available water has fallen by 94% since the beginning of the war, to less than 5 liters per person per day, compared to the 15 liters recommended by the United Nations. As a result, before polio appeared, in the Gaza Strip at least 40,000 cases of hepatitis A (the food-borne type, which can be cured if conditions improve) have already been recorded, compared to only 85 total cases between October 2022 and July 2023, according to UN estimates. Not to mention acute respiratory infections, with over a million cases, and diarrhea. In addition, the WHO has detected approximately 65,000 cases of skin rashes and over 103,000 cases of scabies and lice.
(Unioneonline/D)
