Marie McInerney writes:
International agencies, aid organisations and medical professionals have joined forces to call urgently for a ceasefire to allow life-saving polio vaccinations to be administered to about 640,000 children aged under 10 in Gaza.
The calls follow news of the first confirmed case of polio in the Gaza strip in the city of Deir Al-Balah for a 10-month-old baby who had not received any polio vaccination dose – the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years.
Last Friday, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organization (WHO) issued a joint statement calling on all parties to the conflict to implement humanitarian pauses in the Gaza Strip for seven days to allow for two rounds of vaccination campaigns to take place.
“Gaza is in a humanitarian freefall,” UN Secretary General António Guterres told media.
“Just when it seems the situation could not get worse for Palestinians in Gaza, the suffering grows – and the world watches,” he said.
In an ABC Opinion piece, leading Australian doctors, including former Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Stanley, Distinguished Research Professor at University of Western Australia, have urged the Australian Government to take stronger action towards Israel.
Stanley’s co-authors include Professor Paul Komesaroff AM, Australian physician, philosopher and human rights campaigner; Dr Sue Wareham OAM, president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (Australia), and Dr Bushra Othman, a general surgeon who recently volunteered on a medical mission in Gaza with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association (PANZMA).
They write:
Between 13 June and 3 July 2024, while volunteering at Al Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, Dr Othman saw countless malnourished infants and children who have no access to life-saving nutrition.
Neonates with congenital heart defects, who could thrive with surgery, are being denied medical evacuation and do not survive.
There are adolescents with multiple fractures requiring external fixation who will be debilitated for life given the lack of infrastructure to support their wound care and rehabilitation.”
Stanley and colleagues back the June 2024 urgent global appeal from Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) demanding an immediate and sustained ceasefire, protection of all medical facilities and personnel, medical and humanitarian aid, and comprehensive mental and physical care for the children.
Vicious virus
The UN and WHO said the variant type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2) was detected in July 2024 in environmental samples from two sites in southern and central Gaza.
Since then, three children presenting with suspected acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), a common symptom of polio, have since been reported in the Gaza Strip, they said. The children’s stool samples have been sent for testing in Jordan.
“That means the virus is now circulating, with hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza at risk,” Guterres said.
Left unchecked, polio is a “vicious virus” that would have a disastrous effect not only for Palestinian children in Gaza, but also in neighbouring countries and the region, he said.
The agencies said that preventing and containing the spread of polio, which is highly infectious, will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort, which cannot be done while fighting continues.
“The ultimate vaccine for polio is peace and an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” Guterres said. “But in any case, a Polio Pause is a must.”
The World Health Organization has approved the release of 1.6 million doses of the polio vaccine, with UNICEF to coordinate delivery of the vaccines and the cold chain equipment to store them and medical teams from the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees, the largest primary healthcare provider in Gaza, to administer the vaccines and assist with logistics.
But Guterres said the challenges are grave, given health, water, and sanitation systems in Gaza have been decimated and the majority of hospitals and primary care facilities are not functional.
People are constantly on the run for safety, with routine immunisations severely disrupted by the conflict, increasing the spread of other preventable diseases like measles and hepatitis A.
The Washington Post this week reported: “There is sewage and solid waste in the streets, contaminated drinking water, and few places to bathe or even wash hands, residents say.”
Hours, not weeks
Save the Children, Oxfam, Plan International and a range of other aid agencies have added their calls for a ceasefire to allow polio vaccinations to be rolled out, adding that specialist refrigerated trucks needed to safely transport vaccines have been repeatedly rejected from entry in Gaza throughout the conflict.
In a statement, Save the Children said at least 50,000 children born during the past 10 months of hostilities are highly unlikely to have received any immunisations due to the collapsed health system, while older children among the one million children in Gaza will have had their regular vaccine schedules disrupted or halted.
“Now polio is confirmed, the response needs to be measured in hours, not weeks,” said Jeremy Stoner, Save the Children’s Regional Director for the Middle East.
“Without immediate action, an entire generation is at risk of infection, and hundreds of children face paralysis by a highly communicable disease that can be prevented with a simple vaccine. These children do not have the luxury of time.”
The joint statement from aid agencies reminds the world of the grave risks of polio, a virus that can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours. It is especially dangerous for children under five.
For a polio vaccination campaign to be effective, it must be able to reach at least 95 percent of targeted children. Media reports say Gaza used to be 99 percent vaccinated, but that has dropped to around 86 percent.
This week’s Democratic National Convention featured a panel discussion featuring Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, who spent two weeks in Gaza earlier this year and said she has come back, as do all medical professionals, with the same very urgent message.
“We’ve been trained to protect and preserve human life but the Israeli military campaign is targeting life and everything needed to sustain it in Gaza and that renders our work as physicians impossible,” Haj-Hassan who works for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) told CNN after the panel.
“We are so horrified by what we witnessed. It haunts us in our dreams,” she said. “I cannot count the number of children that died under my care in Gaza from US-made bombs falling on their homes, the places they have been displaced to….”.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the Gaza crisis
