SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Polio, which has been gone from the Gaza Strip for decades, is back as the war there continues. But there is the possibility of good news. Tomorrow, the United Nations will begin to vaccinate children in Gaza against that preventable and highly contagious virus. It'll be an enormous effort, one that NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy will follow from her base in Dubai. And she joins us now. Aya, thanks for being with us.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Tell us about how this vaccination campaign's being rolled out.
BATRAWY: Well, the U.N. has really big aims here. They want to reach more than 640,000 children across Gaza to give them two courses of the polio vaccine. It will be given orally in droplets, but it needs refrigeration at every step, and pretty much Gaza has no electricity. They're just running on generators and fuel that's in short supply. Another logistical challenge here is that the whole population is displaced, and so it's not easy for them to reach U.N.-run clinics. But the U.N. groups leading this vaccination effort, which is UNICEF and the World Health Organization, they say the most critical factor is a pause in airstrikes so that the vaccines can reach all these children. Now, Israel says it's agreed to short pauses. Basically, it won't attack for about eight hours a day in specific parts of Gaza for the few days that this campaign is being rolled out, and Hames says they'll also cooperate.
SIMON: How did the polio spread there in the first place?
BATRAWY: Doctors tell me this was a combination of factors. You know, you have children, Scott, that haven't had access to vaccines, but also most of Gaza's hospitals have been destroyed or closed. You also have wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants that have been bombed, so people have been drinking dirty water to survive. And we know from the Gaza Health Ministry that more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire in this war, but we don't have a tally for people who've died from illness. However, we know there's been a huge spike in kids with infections and diarrhea. Children are hungry. They are malnourished. They're living in these overcrowded shelters or in the open in tents and with weak immune systems.
SIMON: And do we know how widespread polio could now be in Gaza?
BATRAWY: Well, there's already been a case confirmed in a 10-month-old baby boy who was active and crawling, and he's now paralyzed in one leg after contracting polio. And he is the first case of polio in a quarter-century in Gaza. Now, it comes after the Gaza Health Ministry and the World Health Organization - they sounded the alarm on this in July when they announced that the polio virus had been found in sewage water flowing in the streets around the tents of displaced people. And there are now at least two other suspected cases as well. Now, the symptoms for polio show in one out of every 100 to 1,000 people. So the doctors I spoke with say this means thousands of people in Gaza likely already have contracted polio. It is spreading, and one doctor called it a powder keg.
SIMON: And that powder keg would present a risk to other neighboring countries, wouldn't it?
BATRAWY: Extremely so. I mean, you know, for weeks now, you have Israel's military vaccinating its own soldiers, even if they've already been vaccinated against polio before, because polio spreads through water systems, aquifers and in droplets in the air. And so not only could the virus spread to Israel, Egypt and Jordan, it could also reach Europe and the U.S. You know, two years ago, an unvaccinated Orthodox Jewish man in upstate New York contracted polio, and the virus spread there. And the strain of that virus was traced to Jerusalem and London, where there's frequent travel back-and-forth. And so to try to understand more about this, I reached out to Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen. He is a paediatric professor at the University of Florida and a global health expert.
JEFFREY GOLDHAGEN: There is no reason not to expect the disease to spread from Gaza to the surrounding countries, the unvaccinated communities in Israel and from there to Europe, the U.K. and the United States. And the only way of stopping the spread is by a successful, rigorous polio vaccine campaign. The only way that that can happen is if there is a pause in hostilities.
BATRAWY: So Dr. Goldhagen says, you know, the U.N. has succeeded in polio vaccinations in other war zones like Syria, like Yemen, Sudan. And so there is hope that the U.N. and the Palestinian health workers this weekend will be able to start doing this in Gaza too.
SIMON: NPR's Aya Batrawy, thanks so much for being with us.
BATRAWY: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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