Call For Humanitarian Ceasefire After Polio Detected, UN Secretary General: Vaccination Is Impossible To Do During War

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

JAKARTA - United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called on the warring parties in Gaza to provide concrete guarantees of humanitarian pauses to vaccinate polio.

Secretary General Guterres appealed for immediate guarantees when he warned, preventing and containing the spread of polio in the Palestinian enclave would require large coordinated and urgent efforts.

"Let's be clear: the main vaccine for polio is peace and a humanitarian ceasefire immediately," Secretary General Guterres said.

"But after all, the polio break is a must. It is impossible to carry out a polio vaccination campaign when the war is raging everywhere," he said.

Earlier, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a statement it had detected the first confirmed polio case in a ten-month-old baby who had not received any polio vaccination dose in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip.

Secretary General Guterres said the UN was ready to launch a polio vaccination in the Gaza Strip for children under the age of 10, but said it was "serious challenges."

Vaccination coverage of at least 95 percent will be needed during each of the two campaign rounds to prevent the spread of polio and reduce its emergence given the destruction in Gaza, Guterres said.

He added that successful vaccination will require transportation facilitation for vaccines and cooling equipment at every step, the entry of polio experts into Gaza, reliable internet and telephone services and other elements.

Previously, polio was detected in waste in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis provinces in Gaza, said Dr. Hamid Jafari, a WHO polio specialist, in a press conference earlier this month, adding that there was a possibility that the virus had been circulating since September.

A senior Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they understood there was at least one confirmed case and two cases allegedly occurred among Palestinians in the enclave, adding there may not be a single humanitarian break, but a few shorter breaks.

The danger is the threat of an unbounded disease outbreak in Gaza, which officials say is a "transmission time bomb." The official explained that when the rainy season begins at the end of this fall, contaminated raw waste can be "driven" into the aquifers where Israel, Egypt, and Jordan took water.

It is known, poliomielitis, which spreads mainly through the fecal-oral pathway, is a highly contagious virus that can attack the nervous system and cause paralysis.

Children under the age of 5 are most at risk of contracting this virus disease, especially infants under 2 because the normal vaccination campaign has been disrupted by conflict for 10 months.

Without adequate health services, Gaza's population is very vulnerable to disease outbreaks, public health officials and aid groups say.