Thirty-five years ago, polio, a highly infectious viral disease, paralysed around 350,000 children per year. Following a UN-led international push, that number is now less than 50.
The latest round of a large-scale polio vaccination campaign in Gaza targeting nearly 600,000 young children got underway on Saturday.
Countries facing conflict, natural disasters and humanitarian crises are struggling to provide routine childhood immunisations leaving many children vulnerable to the resurgence of polio, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned in new report.
The fighting hasn’t stopped in Gaza but that hasn’t prevented tens of thousands of parents from making sure that their children are given the first of two polio vaccines.
The UN-led initiative inoculated 15,000 youngsters in one school-turned-shelter in central Deir Al-Balah on Monday, according to Louise Wateridge, a spokesperson for the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA.
If the UN-led polio vaccination campaign currently underway in Gaza is to be successful in halting the spread of a virus that has resurfaced in the Strip after 25 years, 90 per cent of children under the age of 10 need to be inoculated. A UN News correspondent has been speaking to some of the concerned parents.
The first phase of a UN-led polio vaccination campaign has begun in the middle areas of Gaza. The operation aims to inoculate 600,000 children in the coming days.
UN aid teams have reached a tentative agreement with parties involved in the war in Gaza for humanitarian pauses to allow 640,000 children to be vaccinated amid an outbreak of the virus, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
