UN calls on them to stop fighting in the Gaza Strip to vaccinate children.
The request was launched in Geneva, Switzerland, by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund, known by the original English acronym UNICEF.
The two agencies “pleaded with all parties to the conflict to adopt humanitarian pauses in Gaza for seven days to enable two rounds of vaccination campaigns” against polio, they said in a statement.
The vaccination campaigns were supposed to have been launched at the end of August and in September, said the WHO and UNICEF, mentioned by the French agency AFP.
Vaccination throughout Gaza aims to “prevent the spread of this variant currently in circulation identified as cVDPV2”.
The WHO and UNICEF warned that without humanitarian pauses, the vaccination campaign “cannot be carried out successfully”.
Each interval in the fighting is expected to last seven days, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told AFP.
⇒Poliovirus detection.
Poliovirus was detected in July in wastewater samples collected at the end of June in Khan Yunis and Deir el-Balah, according to the WHO and UNICEF.
“Worryingly, three children with suspected acute flaccid paralysis, a common symptom of this polio, have meanwhile been registered in Gaza,” they said.
The stool samples were sent for analysis to the Jordanian National Polio Laboratory.
The two UN agencies expect polio vaccination campaigns to reach more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age.
More than 1.6 million doses of the nOPV2 vaccine, which is used to stop the transmission of cVDPV2, are expected to be delivered to Gaza.
The vaccines are expected to pass through Israel’s Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv before arriving in the Gaza Strip at the end of August, according to the press envoy.
The vaccines will then be administered by 708 teams, including in hospitals and health centers in all municipalities of Gaza.
Israel and Hamas have been at war in Gaza for 10 months, following an attack by the Palestinian extremist group on Israeli territory on October 7.
That war has already caused more than 40,000 deaths, according to the 2 parties involved.