U.N. Oversees Immunization Against Polio in Middle East

By an IPS Correspondent Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 11 2013 (IPS) - The UN children’s agency UNICEF is overseeing the largest-ever consolidated immunization under way in the Middle East to stop a polio outbreak, aiming to vaccinate over 20 million children in seven countries and territories repeatedly.

Emergency immunization campaigns in and around Syria to prevent transmission of polio and other preventable diseases have vaccinated more than 650,000 children in Syria, including 116,000 in the highly-contested north-east Deir-ez-Zor province where the polio outbreak was confirmed a week ago, according to a UNICEF press release.

In a region that had not seen polio for nearly a decade, in the last 12 months poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples from Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The outbreak of paralytic polio among children in Syria has catalysed the current mass response, UNICEF said.

The first polio outbreak in the country since 1999, it has so far left 10 children paralyzed, and poses a risk of paralysis to hundreds of thousands of children across the region. Preliminary evidence indicates that the poliovirus is of Pakistani origin and is similar to the strain detected in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Dr. Ala Alwan, the World Health Organization Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean said: “The Middle East has shown exactly the coordinated leadership needed to combat a deadline virus: a consolidated and sustained assault on a vaccine-preventable disease and an extraordinary commitment to a common purpose.”

Multiple mass immunization efforts are aimed at protecting as many children as possible. Inside Syria, the campaign is targeting 1.6 million children with vaccines against polio, measles, mumps and rubella.

In Jordan over 18,800 children under the age of five were vaccinated against polio in a campaign in the past few days targeting all children at Za’atari camp and a nationwide campaign is currently underway to reach 3.5 million people with polio, measles and rubella. In Iraq, a vaccination campaign has started in the west of the country, with another campaign planned in the Kurdistan Region in the coming days. Lebanon’s nationwide campaign begins later this week and Turkey and Egypt by mid-November.

Syria’s immunization rates have plummeted from more than 90% before the conflict to currently 68%.  The seven countries and territories in the consolidated emergency response to the polio outbreak are: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Syria, Turkey, according to UNICEF.

The polio virus usually infects children in unsanitary conditions through faecal-oral transmission associated with close person to person contact and consumption of food and drink contaminated with faeces.

It attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyse, spreading widely and unnoticed before it starts crippling children. For every one case of polio, 200 children can be infected. There is no cure for polio – it can only be prevented through immunization, UNICEF said. Since 1988, vaccination has reduced polio by more than 99% worldwide, and the disease is slated for complete eradication.