Save the Children, part of a coalition of 20 aid organizations and 20 physicians, is warning of the extreme risk to a generation of children in Gaza unless an immediate ceasefire is declared, and full humanitarian access allowed, including urgently administering needed polio vaccine to 640,000 children under the age of 10. Writing yesterday in Common Dreams, Jake Johnson, who is also a respected Haiti expert in the U.S., headlined his coverage “‘An Entire Generation Is at Risk': Aid Agencies Warn of Mass Polio Outbreak in Gaza,” aid agencies and other experts warned on Aug. 20. Johnson revealed that just a few days before Save the Children issued its call, Gaza health officials found the enclave’s first polio case in more than two decades after testing a 10-month-old child in Deir al-Balah—one of the cities in which Gaza’s Health Ministry and the World Health Organization detected poliovirus in wastewater last month.
“Without immediate action, an entire generation is at risk of infection, and hundreds of children face paralysis by a highly communicable disease that can be prevented by a simple vaccine,” said Jeremy Stoner of Save the Children. For a vaccine campaign to be effective, however, it has to reach 95% of targeted children “and this cannot happen in an active war zone,” he asserted. Thus, any ceasefire requested by the UN can’t just be for vaccines, but for full humanitarian access “regardless of whether conflict is active or not.”
Johnson documented what this news service has previously reported in terms on unsanitary conditions in which Gazans live, destruction of waste-removal infrastructure and healthcare system which has laid “the groundwork for a public health catastrophe.” He quoted Nahed Abu Iyada, health program field officer at CARE West Bank and Gaza, who warned that “without an immediate ceasefire and access to vaccines and humanitarian aid across the Strip, the people of Gaza are facing a public health disaster that will spread and endanger children across the region and beyond.”
