Red Cross

AFP A Palestinian boy walks barefoot through Gaza

NOS News•yesterday, 11:12•Modified yesterday, 13:10

Gaza’s health ministry says there has been an outbreak of polio in the area. Fears had been raised after the polio virus was found in sewage samples earlier this month. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that an outbreak was a matter of time.

Polio is a highly contagious disease that can lead to paralysis and encephalitis or meningitis. The time between infection and the first symptoms is usually seven to fourteen days.

“If people are not vaccinated, there is a high risk of getting the virus, especially among children. Polio is therefore also popularly called infantile paralysis,” says Nicole van Batenburg, spokesperson for the Red Cross.

Someone with polio should go into isolation, preferably with their own bathroom, to reduce the chance of infecting others. In densely populated Gaza, where there is a lack of hygiene, drinking water, food and medicine, this is almost impossible. This only increases the chance of transmission, Van Batenburg explains.

According to director Pim Kraan of Save the Children, the situation is getting worse by the day. “People are sitting in tents that are separated by ditches through which sewage flows. There are no toilets and children are playing in the waste. That is where the virus is and we see the risk of a large-scale outbreak of polio increasing enormously.”

In addition, the resistance of the population has already been seriously undermined, says Kraan. “There is large-scale famine and a lack of vegetables and fruit and no clean drinking water. The diseases that we see in our clinics, such as respiratory infections, scabies, diarrhea, measles and now also polio, are diseases that are related to poor hygienic conditions.”

Water as a weapon of war

The WHO is now sending a million polio vaccines to Gaza, but due to the war and inaccessible roads, it is difficult to get the vaccines to the right place. “You also need doctors because not everyone can just administer the vaccinations to children. Setting this up properly is not something that can be arranged in a jiffy, so we are afraid that the virus will spread further,” says Van Batenburg.

Kraan also says that it is difficult to set up a vaccination program in a war zone. “This area is closed off and we do not have free access. So it will be very difficult to bring the resources we need to be able to carry out those vaccinations. Vaccines must be guaranteed to be refrigerated until the moment they are administered. Otherwise they spoil and you make people even more sick.”

In addition, it is not safe anywhere, says Kraan. “People have to be mobilized on a large scale to come to those vaccination points. We have seen in recent days that no school, no shelter, no football field, no place is safe, so I do not see how we should implement this.”

In addition, it is difficult to properly register who has been vaccinated and who has not yet been vaccinated in Gaza, due to the poor health care. Due to attacks by the Israeli army and shelling in the area, the lion’s share of hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

Israel has also destroyed all wastewater treatment plants in Gaza since October 7, the Dutch NGO Oxfam Novib wrote in a reportThe Israeli army is using the lack of water as a weapon of war, the conclusion is.

Israel announced a week and a half ago that it will vaccinate its soldiers in Gaza against polio.