Polio outbreak looms in Gaza’s crippled health system: WHO

GENEVA: The World Health Organization voiced alarm on Tuesday at the prospect of outbreaks of polio and other diseases in war-ravaged Gaza, amid an already crippling health crisis.

Here is an overview of some of the many health challenges facing the Gaza Strip, according to the UN health agency.

United Nations agencies said last week that such vaccine-derived type-2 poliovirus had been detected in samples collected from the sewage in Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip on June 23. No samples have been taken from humans yet, so it remains unclear if anyone in the Palestinian territory has actually been infected.

Ayadil Saparbekov, the WHO’s head of health emergencies in the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that genomic sequencing conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta indicated that the samples had close genetic linkage with each other and to samples found in Egypt in late 2023.

“We do consider that there is a high risk of spreading of... (the) vaccine-derived polio virus in Gaza,” he said.

WHO and the UNICEF children’s agency will send a joint team to Gaza on Thursday to begin collecting human samples, with clear recommendations expected within coming days on addressing the threat, including possibly for a mass vaccination campaign. Israel’s military meanwhile said Sunday that it had started vaccinating its troops in Gaza against polio. Polio is not the only disease that risks spreading in Gaza, which is facing a towering humanitarian crisis after more than nine months of war following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack inside Israel.

“I’m extremely worried about outbreaks happening in Gaza,” Saparbekov said, pointing to the “very dire situation with water sanitation”.

When it comes to polio and other diseases, he warned “it will be very difficult for the population to follow the advice to wash their hands and drink safe water” when living in shelters with one toilet for 600 people and extremely limited access to clean water. “With the crippled health system, lack of water and sanitation, as well as lack of access of the population to health services... this is going to be a very bad situation,” he warned.