The largest-ever consolidated immunization response in the Middle East is under way to stop a polio outbreak, aiming to vaccinate over 20 million children in seven countries and territories repeatedly, said senior United Nations health officials.

These countries are Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Syria, Turkey.

Emergency immunization campaigns in and around Syria to prevent transmission of polio and other preventable diseases have vaccinated more than 650,000 children in the war-ravaged country, including 116,000 in the highly-contested north-east Deir-ez-Zor province where the polio outbreak was confirmed a week ago.

In a region that had not seen polio for nearly a decade, in the last 12 months poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples from Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The outbreak of paralytic polio among children in Syria has catalysed the current mass response. The first polio outbreak in the country since 1999, it has so far left 10 children paralyzed, and poses a risk of paralysis to hundreds of thousands of children across the region.

Preliminary evidence indicates that the poliovirus is of Pakistani origin and is similar to the strain detected in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Dr Ala Alwan, the WHO regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean said: “The Middle East has shown exactly the co-ordinated leadership needed to combat a deadline virus: a consolidated and sustained assault on a vaccine-preventable disease and an extraordinary commitment to a common purpose.”

According to him, Unicef has procured 1.35 billion doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) to date in 2013 and by the end of the year will have up to 1.7 billion doses to meet increased demand.

Global supply of OPV was already under constraint with vaccine manufacturers producing at full capacity. The new outbreak in Syria is adding further pressure to the supply but WHO, Unicef and manufacturers are working to secure sufficient quantities to reach all children.

"The polio outbreak in Syria is not just a tragedy for children; it is an urgent alarm - and a crucial opportunity to reach all under-immunized children wherever they are,” remarked Peter Crowley, the Unicef’s chief of polio.

“This should serve as a stark reminder to countries and communities that polio anywhere is a threat to children everywhere,” he stated.

On the Mideast polio strategy, Crowley said the unprecedented response to polio virus circulation in the region includes plans for a six-month sustained effort of intense immunization activity. Equally important is heightened disease surveillance until the global eradication of polio, to find cases which may have been missed in an environment which was until recently polio-free.
 
Multiple mass immunization efforts, he stated, were aimed at protecting as many children as possible.

Inside Syria, the campaign is targeting 1.6 million children with vaccines against polio, measles, mumps and rubella. In Jordan over 18,800 children under the age of five were vaccinated against polio in a campaign in the past few days targeting all children at Za’atari camp.

Meanwhile, WHO officials said, a nationwide campaign was currently underway to reach 3.5 million people with polio, measles and rubella.

In Iraq, a vaccination campaign has started in the west of the country, with another campaign planned in the Kurdistan Region in the coming days. Lebanon’s nationwide campaign begins later this week and Turkey and Egypt by mid-November.

Syria’s immunization rates have plummeted from more than 90 per cent before the conflict to currently 68 per cent.-TradeArabia News Service