The World Health Organisation has recorded the first suspected outbreak of polio for 14 years in Syria, sparking renewed alarm at the collapse of health care caused by the country’s civil war.
Doctors in Syria are also seeing a flare-up of typhoid, hepatitis, and the flesh-eating parasite, leishmaniasis, blamed partly on the inability to administer a proper vaccination programme and partly on poor living conditions and a much-reduced access to health care.
Some 22 people in the northeastern province of Deir Ezzor are now showing symptoms that are “very likely” to be polio, Oliver Rosenbawer, from the WHO Global Polio Eradication Initiative told The Telegraph.
“We still need final confirmation from a laboratory, but all the indicators show that this is polio,” said Mr Rosenbawer.
For centuries, epidemics of polio, a highly infectious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause paralysis within hours, blighted countries across the globe, leaving hundreds of thousands of children and adults permanently incapacitated.
Vaccination programs have dramatically reduced the number of cases, and the disease is now targeted for global eradication. In the past century the number of cases around the world has fallen from 350,000 in 1988 to 223 reported last year, according to the WHO.
Until this outbreak in Deir Ezzor, in Syria the last recorded case of polio was in 1999.
The Telegraph has the full article
