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Rubbish piles up alongside a defunct sewage treatment plant in Gaza City in May.
CNN
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The highly contagious poliovirus was found in sewage samples. GazaThis puts thousands of Palestinians at risk of contracting a disease that can cause paralysis.
Both the Gaza Health Ministry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said they had carried out tests and found samples of the virus in sewage.
“VDPV2 was detected in six sewage samples taken in Khan Yunis and Deir al-Ba’a on 23 June,” the WHO said in a statement on Friday.
The WHO said the findings were linked to a “dire health situation” caused by Israel’s brutal military offensive in the Gaza Strip since the October 7 attack by Hamas.
“It should be noted that the virus has only been isolated from the environment so far and no associated cases of paralysis have been detected,” the WHO added. No one in Gaza has been treated for paralysis or other symptoms of polio, but residents now “must contend with the threat” posed by the disease, the WHO said.
Various UN agencies, including UNICEF and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), are working with local health authorities to determine how far the virus has spread.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said polio vaccination rates before the conflict were “optimal” but that Israel’s war against Hamas had created “the perfect environment for diseases like polio to spread.”
“Destroyed health systems, lack of security, impaired access, constant population movement, shortages of medical supplies, poor water quality and poor sanitation are increasing the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio,” Tedros warned.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip called for efforts to improve hygiene and safety.
“The detection of the polio-causing virus in sewage is a harbinger of a real health disaster, putting thousands of residents at risk of polio infection,” the committee said in a statement, and demanded an “immediate end to Israel’s aggression.”
Wild polio was eradicated from Gaza more than 25 years ago, and pre-war vaccination coverage will reach 95% by 2022, according to the WHO.
Polioviruses can emerge if, due to low vaccination coverage, a weakened form of the vaccine virus strain given orally mutates into a more virulent form capable of causing paralysis, a spokesman for the WHO’s Global Polio Eradication Programme said.
Meanwhile, a hospital in central Gaza said more than 20 people had been killed in two Israeli airstrikes on homes in the Nuseira district. A CNN correspondent there said the majority of the victims were women and children.
CNN has asked the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) about the reported attack.
