Polio is making a comeback in a decimated part of Syria, but the delicate politics of the war are making vaccination campaigns difficult. As an epidemic looms over the region, anger over the World Health Organization’s inaction is growing.
Dr. Khalid Milaji, a Syrian doctor, is very angry with the World Health Organization (WHO). “They knew it!” he says. “We have been warning them for more than a month that polio is spreading, but they refuse to send the vaccine!” Milaji is part of the Polio Control Task Force, a group trying to rein in a new polio epidemic in Syria with Western assistance, and he is furious that the organization has been resisting their calls for help.
This is the same United Nations organization that has waged an extremely successful campaign against infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, since 1988. In that time, cases of polio have been reduced by 99 percent and the number of affected countries has declined from 125 to half a dozen.
And yet, for weeks, WHO had blocked a vaccination campaign aimed at containing what is probably the most dangerous outbreak in years, in the Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor. The UN organization even tried to stop the analysis of virus samples.
The reason: WHO has a policy of cooperating exclusively with the government in Damascus, even in times of war, despite the fact that the central government has long since given up on Deir ez-Zor. President Bashar Assad’s army controls only two districts of the provincial capital, with the remainder of the whole province in rebel hands.
A Dangerous New Outbreak
Over the last two years, the province has been decimated by bombing. There is no more electricity, health care, telephone network or sewage treatment plant. Close to half a million refugees are crowded into towns along the Euphrates River, which is where the first polio cases occurred in September. More cases were reported in Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the middle of last week, with a total count of new reported cases reaching 48 by last Friday, and with new cases appearing daily.
Polio has become a new point of contention within the war, pitting the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Syrian doctors and the Turkish Health Ministry against WHO and the government in Damascus.
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Syria
Hmmm seems like Biological war has already started.