20m children to get polio vaccine in Middle East

geneva — The UN has launched the largest-ever polio vaccination campaign in the Middle East, aiming to immunise more than 20 million children in seven countries amid an outbreak of the crippling virus in war-torn Syria, officials said on Friday.

“The polio outbreak in Syria is not just a tragedy for children; it is an urgent alarm — and a crucial opportunity to reach all under-immunised children wherever they are,” Peter Crowley, who heads the UN children’s agency’s polio division, said in a statement.

The World Health Organisation last week confirmed the polio outbreak in Syria, which had been free of the disease since 1999.

“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,” WHO and Unicef said in a joint statement.

“It has so far left 10 children paralysed, and poses a risk of paralysis to hundreds of thousands of children across the region,” they stressed, pointing out that Syria has seen its immunisation rate plummet from more than 90 per cent before the conflict began in March 2011 to 68 per cent today.

The whole region will now face an intense vaccination push over the next six months, and will be on heightened alert to spot cases that may have been missed, they said.

More than 650,000 children in Syria, including 116,000 in the strife-torn northeastern Deir Ezzor province where the polio outbreak was confirmed last week, had already received emergency vaccinations, Unicef and the WHO said. —