| New York Times | - |
Published: October 29, 2013. GENEVA - United Nations officials confirmed an outbreak of polio among children in Syria
on Tuesday, lending urgency to plans for vaccination campaigns there
and in nearby countries to try to halt the spread of the disease.
U.N. Confirms an Outbreak of Polio in Syria
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE
Published: October 29, 2013
GENEVA — United Nations officials confirmed an outbreak of polio among
children in Syria on Tuesday, lending urgency to plans for vaccination
campaigns there and in nearby countries to try to halt the spread of the
disease.
Tests confirmed polio in 10 out of 22 children in Deir al-Zour Province
in northeastern Syria who became ill this month, said Oliver Rosenbauer,
a spokesman for the World Health Organization. Results of tests on the
other 12 children are expected soon, he added.
“With population movements, it can travel to other areas,” Mr.
Rosenbauer said, “so the risk is high of spread across the region.”
United Nations officials said last week that they were beginning a campaign to immunize
2.4 million children in Syria against polio and other diseases. With
thousands of refugees fleeing daily from Syria’s civil war to
neighboring countries, the officials are also intensifying immunization
efforts in six countries: Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, which have
taken in more than two million Syrian refugees, as well as Egypt and
Israel.
Most of the affected children in Syria are younger than 2, Mr.
Rosenbauer said, underscoring the impact of 31 months of conflict on
Syria’s health infrastructure. The United Nations says half a million
Syrian children have not been inoculated against polio in a country
where, before the conflict, 95 percent of the country’s population was
immunized.
Despite the difficulty of delivering vaccines in a country convulsed by
war, Unicef said it had vaccinated about a million Syrian children this
year, including 800,000 who were vaccinated against polio.
After confirming the presence of the disease, attention is turning to
identifying the source, Mr. Rosenbauer said. Public health officials
have speculated that a possible source may have been jihadi fighters
traveling to Syria from Pakistan which, with Afghanistan and Nigeria,
are the only countries where the disease is still endemic.
The outbreak of polio in Syria “shows you have to eradicate the disease
in the endemic countries because from there it will spread no matter
where you are,” Mr. Rosenbauer, who works with the World Health
Organization’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative, said in an interview.
The polio outbreak in Syria was “a setback” like any upsurge in the
disease, but health officials were seeing significant progress in
curbing the disease in endemic countries, Mr. Rosenbauer said. In
Pakistan and Nigeria, the disease is geographically more restricted, and
in southern Afghanistan, the area of that country where the disease
remains endemic, no new cases had been reported this year. “That’s never
happened before,” he said.
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