For most people in North America, polio is a distant memory – for Gazans, it is a part of their reality
From the Canadian and North American perspective, the polio disease is generally regarded as a thing of the past. The three continental North American countries – Canada, the United States, and Mexico – have not had any occurrences of wild polio since the late twentieth century. But this is not the case in the rest of the world. While globally, the effects of polio have been curbed by widespread vaccination throughout the past century, the disease has not been entirely eradicated. The recent escalation of hostilities in Gaza have exacerbated the risk of disease; in August 2024, 11-month-old Abdul-Rahman Abu al’Jidyan became the first case of polio in a quarter of a century in the region. With a single diagnosis increasing the potential for hundreds of more cases, in a region where conflict has resulted in vaccination rates dropping from 99 percent to 86 percent, the World Health Organization (WHO) seeks to stop a potential crisis before it worsens and becomes a regional outbreak.
Polioviruses are spread mostly through human waste and can result in deadly infections, most notably paralysing those who contract it. Cases are characterised by affecting use of the legs or muscles in the chest that are necessary for breathing. In about 0.4 percent of cases, the virus results in death. The disease most directly impacts children, meaning that vaccination efforts first seek to protect young people from polio’s effects. Polio can manifest itself in the form of “wild polio,” referring to the disease in its raw form found in nature. Likewise, people who have been vaccinated with deactivated versions of the disease have the possibility to reanimate the virus in their excretions, leading to the risk of more infections. By 2015, however, a strain of wild polio, type 2, was considered officially extinct; it was suggested that continuing to vaccinate for it would result in higher risk of the virus propagating through human waste. As such, some vaccinations dropped any trace of type 2 polio in 2016. Unfortunately, estimations were off, and type 2 polio continued to circulate with fewer people having the appropriate defences in place. It is understood that type 2 polio is the strain that has arrived in Gaza this year.
The Israel Defense Forces’s bombing campaign and stringent policy for external supplies has crippled Gaza’s water sanitation capabilities, resulting in the proliferation of fecal matter in public places, providing ripe circumstances for the virus to spread. The reality of operating in an area of active conflict is that the practice of organised inoculations is considerably more difficult than in an area at peace. The usual practice of going from house-to-house and vaccinating inhabitants is impossible due to wartime displacement, and the constant risk of violence adds an additional challenge to any operation in the area. However, the WHO’s first set of efforts have yielded results: since Abu al’Jidyan’s case became public, the WHO has carried out over 500,000 vaccinations with a new type of inoculation that makes it considerably more difficult for polio in excrement to regain the ability to infect. Members of the WHO have claimed as high as a 95 percent vaccination rate for children. The next six months have been designated as an observation period to ascertain whether or not the presence of polio has truly come to an end. Vaccinations were carried out during very short periods of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, ostensibly creating a safer atmosphere for medical attention. Outside of these periods, the conflict raged on. CNN reported that on September 3, 2024, it only took a few minutes for the ceasefire to be over, when newly vaccinated children, three-year-old Hanan and one-year-old Misk Al-Daqqi, were hit by Israeli bombs; both children lost limbs or appendages in the attack.
The risk of contracting polio is one of the many dangers Gazans are subjected to in 2024. Disease comes alongside the risks of violence and starvation that already pervaded the area before the risk of virus arose. Polio’s specific danger to children makes it a particularly insidious disease to combat. The circumstances in Gaza continue to evolve as days pass, but a swift response has resulted in the potential for massive harm reduction, though not one without casualties.
