The UN health agency said on Friday that it is sending more than a million polio vaccines to Gaza after the discovery of the highly infectious disease in sewage samples.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the vaccines will be administered to children in the coming weeks.

He noted that no cases of polio have been recorded yet but without immediate action, it was “just a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected”.

Humanitarians have expressed deep concerns about the impact of a possible polio emergency in Gaza, amid disastrous sanitary conditions marked by outbreaks of hepatitis A and myriad other preventable diseases, along with a lack of access to healthcare, because of the war.

Preventable deaths crisis

Earlier this week, Dr. Ayadil Saparbekov, Team Lead for Health Emergencies at WHO in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, warned that the spread of polio and other communicable diseases could lead to more people dying of preventable illness than from war-related injuries – currently 39,000, according to the local health authorities.

On 16 July, the WHO said that vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 had been identified at six locations in sewage samples collected last month from Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah – two Gaza cities left in ruins by nearly 10 months of intense Israeli bombardment.

WHO explained that polio virus can emerge in areas where poor vaccination coverage allows the weakened form of the orally taken vaccine virus strain to mutate into a stronger version.

Pre-war gains lost

Before the war, sparked by Hamas-led terror attacks on multiple locations in southern Israel, Gazan youngsters had access to “robust” routine vaccination services, the UN health agency insisted on Friday.

But while an estimated 99 per cent of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory received their third dose of polio vaccine in 2022, this fell to 89 per cent in 2023, according to the latest routine immunization estimates by WHO and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

As part of collective efforts to combat circulating variant poliovirus type 2 in Gaza and beyond, the WHO convened health ministers from across the Eastern Mediterranean region on Thursday.

Gaza - a polio playground

“I witnessed at first hand living conditions that are highly favourable for the spread of polio and other diseases,” said Dr Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, who called the meeting. “This is an important time…to come together to act swiftly and decisively to contain this outbreak, for the children of Gaza.”

Measures agreed upon at the meeting included intensified surveillance and “multiple mass polio immunization campaigns” that can be integrated with other crucial health service delivery, “when feasible”.

Representatives also called for a “safe and enabling environment” for vaccination roll-out “by way of a ceasefire or days of tranquillity, to allow for steps to be taken to stop polio from paralyzing children in Gaza, and surrounding areas and countries”.

The latest gathering of the Regional Subcommittee on Polio Eradication and Outbreaks also highlighted the urgent need to stop all forms of poliovirus in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is home to the last two countries in the world with endemic wild poliovirus transmission: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Countries of the region are also facing active variant poliovirus outbreaks, such as Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.