A health disaster is looming for displaced Palestinians living in tent camps, where sewage flows freely, contaminating the water.
Poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples in the densely populated Gaza Strip, putting “thousands” of Palestinians at risk of contracting the highly infectious disease that can cause paralysis.
Gaza’s health ministry said it had detected “type 2 poliovirus” in coordination with UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.
“The detection of the virus responsible for polio in wastewater heralds a real health catastrophe and exposes thousands of residents to the risk of contracting polio,” she said in a statement on Thursday.
The virus could be detected in wastewater “that accumulates and flows between the tents of the displaced,” the ministry said. Drinking water supplies, already scarce in this densely populated strip, risk being contaminated by the virus.
Authorities in Deir el-Balah, a city in central Gaza, predicted this week that “roads would be flooded with sewage” and “diseases would spread” after shutting down sewage pumping and treatment stations.
“We are talking about a very grim medical reality,” said Tel Aviv Tribune’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah, where 700,000 people have arrived seeking safety from fighting and airstrikes.
The Israeli military’s escalation of attacks on “water wells, sanitation facilities and sewage treatment,” as well as its obstruction of the delivery of “essential hygiene supplies” to the Gaza Strip, have created an “environment conducive to the spread of various diseases,” he said.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care physician, told Tel Aviv Tribune that the presence of the virus in sewage was a “ticking time bomb”.
“Normally, if you have a case of polio, you’re going to isolate them, you’re going to make sure they use a toilet that no one else is using, you’re going to make sure they’re not around other people, (but) that’s impossible,” she said.
“Everyone is now congregating in refugee camps without having been vaccinated for at least nine months, including children who would otherwise have been vaccinated against polio and adults who, in the context of an outbreak, should receive a booster, including health workers,” she added.
The spread of the disease among health workers would be “catastrophic,” Haj-Hassan said, for a health system already “devastated by direct targeting, by kidnappings of health workers, by (the) killing of health workers.”
The Israeli Health Ministry had previously said it had evidence of the presence of the “poliovirus type 2 component” found in sewage samples taken in the Gaza Strip.
She ordered the Israeli army to vaccinate all soldiers present in the Gaza Strip as well as those about to enter it, and recommended a booster for those already vaccinated.
The poliovirus discovery comes after a European activist group released a report claiming the Gaza Strip is “drowning” under hundreds of thousands of tons of human waste and rubble from the war.
United Nations health agencies launched a global campaign in 1980 to eradicate polio, which is most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, but there has been a resurgence of the disease in recent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.