Deliveries of vaccines against childhood diseases such as polio or measles They entered Gaza on Monday through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority (ANP) Health Minister Mai al Kalia reported.
The vaccines, which were procured on the one hand by the ANP government – with no direct control over Gaza and with limited power in the West Bank – and also donated by Unicef, “they started coming to the Gaza Strip.” This used the “cold chain on Egyptian territory to store the vaccines until they reached Gaza,” Al Kalia said.
According to him, once in Gaza, the “International Standards for Vaccine Preservation” will be used in accordance with UNICEF’s supervision. This is crucial given the increasing spread of epidemics – especially among children – in Gaza.
There are vaccines against polio, measles, mumps and also “other routine medicines” to be administered to children, and the health service expects these “will be sufficient for a period of between eight and 14 months”.
Due to the war and the precarious conditions in which approximately 1.9 million internally displaced persons live in the Gaza Strip, infections and infectious diseases are spreading rapidly in the Gaza Strip (85% of the population) and the lack of food, water, medicine, basic materials or fuel in light of the Israeli siege, which has made access to humanitarian aid quite poor.
Many hospitals in the enclave are out of service due to a lack of electricity, and those that are working are at least doing so, a situation that contributes to the spread of infectious diseases.
Two days ago, Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warned that a quarter of Gaza’s population could die from contagious outbreaks within a year.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 180,000 Gazans suffer from respiratory infections, there are more than 136,000 cases of diarrhea – half of which affect children under the age of five -, approximately 55,400 cases of lice and scabies, and another 5,300 cases of chickenpox, 42,000 cases of rash and 126 cases of meningitis.
The day before yesterday, COGAT – the Israeli Organization for the Coordination of Civil Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – announced that it had coordinated with UNICEF the import of tens of thousands of doses of vaccines to Gaza to prevent polio, tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis or meningitis .
Source: La Neta Neta
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
