The World Health Organization said there
was a high risk of the polio virus spreading across the Gaza Strip and beyond
its borders due to the dire health and sanitation situation in the war-ravaged
Palestinian enclave.
Ayadil Saparbekov, team lead for
health emergencies at WHO in Gaza and the West Bank, said circulating
vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 had been isolated from environmental samples
from sewage in Gaza.
"There is a high risk of
spreading of the circulating vaccine-derived polio virus in Gaza, not only
because of the detection but because of the very dire situation with the water
sanitation," he told reporters in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem.
"It may also spill over
internationally, at a very high point."
Saparbekov said WHO and UNICEF
workers were scheduled to arrive in Gaza on July 18 to collect human stool
samples as part of a risk assessment related to the discovery of the virus.
He said the assessment, which he
hoped would be completed by the end of the week, would allow health officials
to issue recommendations, "including the need for a mass vaccination
campaign as well as what kind of vaccine should be used and what the age group
of the population that will need to be vaccinated".
Poliomyelitis, which is spread
mainly through the fecal-oral route, is a highly infectious virus that can
invade the nervous system and cause paralysis. It mainly affects children under
the age of 5.
Israel's
military said it would start offering the polio vaccine to
soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip after remnants of the contagious polio virus
were found in test samples in areas of the coastal enclave.
The military also said that with the
cooperation of international groups enough vaccines had been brought in to
cover more than one million people in Gaza, which has a total population of
around 2.3 million.
Without proper health services, the
population of Gaza is particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, public
health officials and aid groups say.
"I'm extremely worried about an
outbreak happening in Gaza. And this is not only polio, different outbreaks of
communicable diseases," Saparbekov said.