UN agencies said on Friday they were stepping up efforts to vaccinate children in Syria against a host of diseases amid fears of a possible polio outbreak in the war-torn country.
The UN’s children’s agency and the World Health Organisation said they were taking part in “a large-scale immunisation effort aimed at protecting as many children as possible both in the country and across the region against polio”.
Last weekend, the WHO warned that Syria might be facing its first outbreak of the crippling disease since 1999, after two suspected polio cases were detected in the eastern Deir Al Zour province.
Around 500,000 children in Syria have not been vaccinated against polio in the past two years due to insecurity and access constraints
WHO spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer stressed in an email on Friday that “final lab confirmation is still pending”, but acknowledged “the operating assumption is that these suspect cases will likely be confirmed, and everyone is in outbreak response mode”.
The highly infectious disease affects mainly children under five and can cause paralysis in a matter of hours. Some cases can be fatal.
Twenty other children in the region, most under the age of two, had also been stricken with acute flaccid paralysis, which is the symptom of a number of different diseases, including polio.
The cases are being investigated, but Rosenbauer pointed out that in of the some 100,000 such cases his organisation examines each year, only a few hundred turn out to be due to polio.