Pearls and Irritations

As the world’s media is mesmerised by political events in the USA and the findings by the ICJ of the illegal occupation by Israel of Gaza and the West Bank have slipped off the headlines, health officials in Gaza have found yet another potential catastrophic virus in the waste water, the poliovirus.

In response, the Israeli military rushed to inoculate its soldiers serving in Gaza against the disease, and health authorities have taken the necessary steps to prevent an outbreak in Israel. The ICRC and other health bodies warn of this new disastrous health situation looming for the embattled residents of Gaza as Israel keeps the borders closed to urgently needed polio and other vaccines.

A number of agencies have identified the presence of the virus. The UN children’s agency, UNICEF, “showed the presence of poliovirus”, and the World Health Organisation made similar findings. The Gaza Health ministry, noted that “The presence of poliovirus in waste water that collects and flows between displacement camp tents and in inhabited areas because of the destruction of infrastructure marks a new health disaster.”

Thousands of people, especially those not vaccinated including children and infants, are at great risk of catching the disease that can cause serious and long-term symptoms affecting the brain and nerves, including long term paralysis, and even death. Among those who survive some are very likely to have long term deformities requiring extensive rehabilitation and physiotherapy.

The virus spreads through contact with faeces, lack of access to water for hand washing and through contaminated food or water.

The lack of water, the summer heat, poor and mostly non existing food storage facilities and mountains of untreated human garbage make children in Gaza at very great risk of catching polio.

The Gaza Health Ministry has called, “for an immediate halt to the Israeli aggression, providing usable water, repairing sewage lines, and ending population crowding in places of displacement”.

The deliberate bombing and destruction of UNRWA schools, 9 last week alone, the calculated bombing of UNRWA headquarters, its distribution centres, health facilities and the killing of nearly 200 of UNRWA staff in Gaza will only add to the extreme difficulties of implementing a vaccination program if the vaccine were available. Israel continues to block all entry points into Gaza including the important Rafah crossing from Egypt and the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossing from Israel.

In addition to the vicious attempt to completely militarily destroy UNRWA in Gaza, the Israeli Knesset has approved a draft law declaring UNRWA to be a “terrorist organisation”.

While the IDF protects their own soldiers it continues to impede the entry of vaccines, medical goods, hygiene supplies and facilities, especially fuel to run the hospitals and to run the waste water processors and it obstructs the maintenance of trucks necessary to remove the waste that is contributing to this outbreak. But while polio is the most serious of infectious diseases there is already widespread hepatitis with 8,000 reported cases of Hepatitis A, a vaccine-preventable and usually limited illness, but which left untreated can cause liver failure and even death. There is also widespread respiratory and gastrointestinal disease and the threat of typhoid and cholera due to the destruction and lack of facilities and personnel necessary for public health measures. As the IRC has warned, “immunity, previously ensured thanks to high levels of vaccination, is now decreasing especially among children and babies, who have now missed multiple doses of key vaccines including Hepatitis B, polio, and rota-virus”.

The other contributing factors are the severely overcrowded tented cities where thousands of people are cramped together and there are no proper public toilets or washing facilities. There is also a chronic lack of drinking water as well as water for washing, again deliberately caused by the IDF. There is also no register of where all the children and infants are located due to the multiple times they have been forced to move by the occupying army, so an immunisation program in such circumstances is extremely difficult, more so as the military conflict continues.

The recent displacement of 700,000 people from Rafah and Al Musawah previously designated, “safe zones” by the IDF to Deir el Balah following sustain bombing has contributed to the crisis there. Local authorities have warned that roads, “will be flooded by waste water”, and that 700,000 civilians, most of them displaced, would be put at risk of catching sewage-borne diseases”, among them polio, cholera and hepatitis and bacterial dysentery.

Research by a Dutch activists group Pax shows that months of continuous bombing and Israel’s fuel blockade have decimated Gaza’s outdated waste collection system. Their research, using satellite imagery showed 225 growing waste dumps across Gaza as the IDF is preventing access to Gaza’s three official landfills. From these waste dumps heavy metals could contaminate water supplies and farmland and eventually penetrate the food chain affecting humans. They warn of regional, wide grave ecosystem and public health problems.

But it’s not only the threat of serious infections that are threatening Gazan children, the UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Adele Khodr, has stated that,“horrific images continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families’ eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies, and the destruction of healthcare services.” She said that, “unless treatment can be quickly resumed for these 3,000 children, they are at immediate and serious risk of becoming critically ill, acquiring life-threatening complications, and joining the growing list of boys and girls who have been killed by this senseless, man-made deprivation.”

Ending the war immediately might, just might, save some of these lives at risk.

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